Quoting: Purple Library GuySo, what is the state of Mono? I remember back in the day it was all controversial and people thought it would never get close to parity with the stuff it was emulating and attempts to use it would mostly just make Linux look bad. But I get the impression that these days it's maybe pretty good?

Seemed fine for the visual novels I played that needed dotnet support...

It works okay for running Keepass but it's certainly ugly. C# is considered properly cross-compatible because of Mono now, so it can't be that bad...

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Quoting: Raaben

Quoting: crt0mega

Quoting: PikoloThe giveaway doesn't load in Firefox. Does load in Chrome.

I also had trouble with FF. Thanks for the Info

I had to reload 2-3x but it did work for me in FF.

Firefox also struggled to load it for me. After 2 refreshes, the button appeared and I claimed it.

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Quoting: Phlebiac

QuoteSadly they've had issues publishing the full version on itch.io, as they were told it's too big to be hosted there.

itch.io has a size limit, and a visual novel is too big?

Apparently, it's normally 1GB, but if you use Butler to upload the game, it can be up to 2GB. According to the Butler docs:

QuoteLimits: currently, the itch.io backend will reject builds with a total uncompressed size that exceeds 30GB.

Slay the Princess is 9GB according to GOG. This is pretty big for a visual novel, but it isn't unheard of. From my own library:

• TroubleDays - 572MB
• Higurashi Chapter 5 - 610MB
• The Expression Amrilato - 749MB
• Aki Uso - 1.7GB
• Suteki na Kanojo no Tsukurikata - 2.3GB
• TRianThology - 2.5GB
• H2O - 2.7GB
• Fortune Arterial - 3.1GB
• Subarashiki Hibi - 3.3GB
• Hatsuyuki Sakura - 4.1GB
• Aiyoku no Eustia - 4.1GB
• DRACU-RIOT - 4.3GB
• Aokana - 9.5GB

Edit: I called this game "Slay the Spire" the first time, lol.

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Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualChimeraOS's "gamescope-session" is a session with just gamescope you can log into

Yeah, it's what the Deck's Game Mode is. Normal nested-gamescope can sometime have issues, both on x11 and Wayland. Currently having that issue myself - latest gamescope from both AUR and pika-os' repo are broken, while flatpak gamescope that Bottles used worked just fine.

Do you have a NVIDIA card? It's also broken for me. There was a regression for the 3.12.5 release of Gamescope, but NVIDIA needs to fix it. I found that AUR-compiled Gamescope worked in Lutris, strangely. And I don't use the Flatpak versions of those programs.

Well, with the newest release, it may not work in Lutris anymore. Fortunately, I'm playing on my Intel laptop most of the time.

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Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualSorry if you already know this stuff lol but I felt like sharing. Everything just made so much more sense to me after I looked into it all.

Oh no, I understand how you feel and what you're saying completely. It can be kinda weirdly frustrating dealing with Japanese games which, by all means, should really just works but for some reason you need to go on a whole journey to reach full enlightenment where you can deal with most of the problems. I pretty much did the same myself on the IdolDays protonDB page.

Which, speaking of, just shows that the old guide is still useful. It's old, and a lot of things works well enough through native Wine (or Proton -- played My Klutzy Cupid last month, got stuck at opening movie until I switch from Wine-GE to Proton-GE after my usual codec checks didn't work on Wine-GE), but man does it work for a lot of things and very helpful for getting started.

Haha, yep, that's basically what it feels like. A journey to full enlightenment. I haven't tested it at all, but my bet is that Windows Media Player 10 is what got IdolDays to play. I had a similar issue with Suteki na Kanojo no Tsukurikata, which would refuse to play the intro movie and crash without Windows Media Player 11 installed (it wanted a 64-bit Wineprefix). In that game's case, it was because of Wine's broken/partially implemented Media Foundation support, and...well, it's a whole thing.

I spent some time writing up a troubleshooting guide for VNs a few months ago. Far from complete, but I thought it was a good start. I don't know if it'd be any use to you, but just in case...

I think the sections on media playback are relevant to most people (and unfortunately this is a difficult problem). The Media Foundation revelations were particularly discouraging...

QuoteAnd yeah, gamescope is super useful, especially as some games are just outright unresizeable. If nothing else, the integrated FSR helps make it looks better on 1080p LCD screens. Kind of annoying that nested gamescope still have issues sometimes though (not like gamescope-session is flawless itself, outside of SteamOS).

Okay, I have to admit to being a complete noob with Gamescope. I just pipe a VN .exe from Wine into Gamescope and call it a day, and that has worked great for me. I'm guessing this is called "nested Gamescope", and ChimeraOS's "gamescope-session" is a session with just gamescope you can log into? I don't use Steam much because the VNs I buy are rarely on Steam. Even when I do, I don't usually do anything other than configure the Proton version.

And yeah...sometimes things get weird in Gamescope. But it's 10 times better than needing to zoom into my desktop to read a VN in (almost) fullscreen, lol.

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Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual(in case you were wondering, prefix is a shell function for selecting a Wineprefix in ~/.local/share/wineprefixes, and winejp sets LANG to ja_JP.UTF-8)

Hey, I do the same thing with my own winejp prefix. You made that one using the old guide too?

The prefix shell function is actually from the Winetricks wiki: https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/wiki/Shell-Tips-&-Tricks

I don't think the learnjapanese.moe guide actually had an alias for that. I started off with that guide a few years ago and it was a great way to get things up and running. I'm seriously thankful that guide existed at the time I needed it. Since then, I've done about...100 hours of research into Wine, Winetricks, DXVK, etc. and lots of experimentation to figure stuff out. I understand this stuff a lot more now.

Most of the verbs learnjapanese.moe tells you to install through Winetricks aren't necessary for most visual novels. Wine has already implemented a lot of the functionality for the Visual C++ libraries, so you shouldn't need to install the runtimes. Wine Mono should work for the vast majority of visual novels, so you shouldn't need the proprietary dotnet stuff. And depending on whether your game is using DirectShow or Media Foundation to handle media, lavfilters, ffdshow, and quartz might have no effect.

I think these non-free libraries should be applied selectively depending on the errors you get, because they might actually break things the native implementation won't! In my experience, most visual novels work great with just DXVK and all the native Wine stuff. However, I do play mostly newer visual novels. Those dependencies are mostly useful for older VNs (but again, you should install them selectively).

I also highly recommend Gamescope when dealing with older visual novels. I've found that older games tend to be broken when you fullscreen them, or would crash when I switched workspaces, and it was the number one most annoying thing to me. Gamescope finally solved that issue!

Sorry if you already know this stuff lol but I felt like sharing. Everything just made so much more sense to me after I looked into it all.

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Quoting: Mountain ManI sometimes miss the good ol' days when you could just install a game and play it without having to worry about launchers.

I feel like Lutris is able to fill much of that role. It does its best to be agnostic to whatever store you get games from—GOG, itch, Steam; it'll just download and install the game for you as soon as you link your account up.

But sometimes, I just run games directly from my ~/games folder in my file manager. Lutris is useful to me mainly for Wine gaming, as most of the games I play are Windows-only. Even then, sometimes I just use the terminal:

prefix vn32
winejp dracuriot.exe

(in case you were wondering, prefix is a shell function for selecting a Wineprefix in ~/.local/share/wineprefixes, and winejp sets LANG to ja_JP.UTF-8)

But it's nice to be able to do this stuff from a GUI most of the time.

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Quoting: ripperPerhaps a stupid question, but what's the purpose of adding your Steam games to Lutris? Steam already has Proton integration, so what's the benefit?

Lefl has it right.

My game sources:

• Steam, of course, several hundred games
• GOG, a few dozen
• itch.io, over a hundred
• DLsite, about 20 games so far (no launcher)
• JAST, less than 5 so far
• Physical visual novels; 5 of these so far.

It's nice to have it one place!

I like Bottles too, but I've adapted Lutris to work better for me. Lutris just has more features that are useful to me. Heroic Games Launcher seems nice, though.

Also, fair warning that a minor update in the Gamescope 3.12 series is broken on NVIDIA GPUs. 3.12.5 is supposedly the last version that works.

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Quoting: Fester MuddNo, no, no. I pointed out that you assumed that Canonical does not review at all as they're now taking extra special measures by manually reviewing [...] How can you suggest i accused you of LYING also, when you just asked about it. Please don't dramatize you know full well i did not make you appear like a liar.

I didn't assume that. If I assumed that, I might have said:

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualWell, that's about what you'd expect when you don't review packages.

I phrased it as a question. I was asking for confirmation. It was not rhetorical. I made it clear this was not rhetorical in my follow-up comment.

You seem to have taken that as me intentionally pretending not to know (lying, or gaslighting, if you prefer; there was clearly an element of deception you were implying) that Snapcraft obviously reviews packages in an attempt to instigate drama. I mean, how could I be honestly suggesting that the phrase temporary manual review might mean that manual review is something that isn't done normally?

I would appreciate if you had done me the courtesy of assuming good faith.

Quoting: Fester Muddand your name suggests you're an avid researcher, you know?

I'll give you that one. Though, since we've both dramatically misinterpreted each other's comments now, I'll go ahead and call us even

Although, in the Arch forums, users might respond with a link that answers the question and nothing else

Maybe I should have gone with pleasegivemethemanual.

Anyway, sorry; I shouldn't have reacted emotionally.

Quoting: Fester MuddMaybe google is avoiding you but also Alan Pope talked about the curation of Snap Store.

I can't seem to find this article on his blog.

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Quoting: Fester_MuddHonestly. Your handle is "pleasereadthemanual" but here you are just assuming without even bothering to google (you would have found the answer right away).

It's a joke. I'm an Arch user. I have never actually said that to anyone, and you are the first person to take offense to it in my 2 years of using this site.

Quoting: Fester MuddAs they take more special measures to tackle this, to you it automatically suggests that before they did not review at all. Sure and upvotes from Ubuntu haters on these grounds i mean it's so obvious.

It's generous of you to assume I'm lying to create drama.

What exactly makes this manual review special compared to whatever Canonical was doing before? I've read it several times, yet I do not understand what difference you are suggesting there is.

Quoting: Fester MuddLinux users should keep together more. Many users could learn to google even, before such assumptions based on well nothing.....

You mean, my assumption based on reading a 198-word announcement from Canonical themselves? I didn't assume anything. I asked an open question to anyone who did know whether my understanding of the announcement was true.

I read GamingOnLinux because I don't have endless free time to research topics in-depth (particularly those that are only peripherally related to me), and occasionally I rely on other users to teach me things. I've learned a lot from members in this community and had some productive and interesting discussions.

I spent several minutes using a search engine to look this up. The best I could find was this: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/process-for-reviewing-classic-confinement-snaps/1460

There is this page, too, which vaguely suggests that Snapcraft will run automated reviews for some packages and manual reviews for other packages: https://ubuntu.com/core/services/guide/snap-publishing

Quoting: CanonicalUploaded snaps undergo automated and manual review processes, depending on the security profile of the snap. Snaps are checked by Canonical’s snap reviewer team to ensure that they are safe to use.

Putting the two together, some sort of automated testing was run for all Snap packages that did not use the "classic" profile.

Quoting: poiuzDifferent emphasis.

Could you explain what you are trying to imply by emphasizing this section? "on all new" suggests they weren't doing it before, either. Perhaps you meant to emphasize all, to imply they were manually reviewing some packages?

Quoting: poiuzThere's a review forum.

I assume you're referring to this: https://forum.snapcraft.io/c/store-requests/19

Looking through some old manual review requests, it seems they occur when the Snap package asks for more permissions than expected: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/manual-review-for-udisks2/36633

There were about 15 manual review requests this year. This one is interesting: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/request-for-manual-review-of-the-last-brave-releases/35498

Just because it is manually reviewed the first time does not mean that all subsequent releases are automatically approved.

Here's another request for review where the requester expresses discontent about the time it takes to review their packages: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/manual-review-request-for-several-kde-apps-long-delays/34628

So, going back to the original article, Snapcraft felt the right move was to institute manual review for all Snaps. This suggests the 3 malicious Snaps were automatically approved without manual review. From this, we can conclude that the Snaps did not ask for too many permissions, and yet they were still able to act maliciously. Determining which Snaps to review manually based on permissions, then, is not viable; regardless of what permissions the Snap has, it can potentially cause harm.

Snapcraft also did not take this decision lightly, as they could not cope well with the amount of manual reviews already. This still seems to me like the right decision based on my understanding so far.

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