Writing Tools: Using Scrivener on Linux

Yesterday, I decided to move Sodom All Over Again from Microsoft Word to Scrivener. It wasn’t a spur of the moment decision. I’ve used Scrivener before, but the novel started in Word years before I started using Scrivener and it was just easier to stay than to migrate. But keeping my notes in different files or appended to the end of the document was difficult. Plus I found I’d already doubled up on chapter numbers when I was just 19 chapters in (i.e. I was really on chapter 19 when I thought I was on chapter 17) plus I was sort of inconsistent about denoting scene breaks.

Since I already had the Scrivener license, it was just a matter of biting the bullet and taking the time to build out a Scrivener project and then import the scenes into it. Then it hit me… I’d swapped my laptop from Windows to Aurora Linux as a test for trying to swap my desktop to Linux. I don’t have the same animosity toward Microsoft that I do toward Apple, but both Apple and Microsoft are trying to AI all the things in their operating systems and I want my AI features to be opt-in, not opt-out.

Oops! There’s No Scrivener for Linux

I got a few chapters in and realized that the days I leave my home office and go work at a co-working space or go to a “parallel play” writing meetup, I don’t want to be cut off from working on novels. Scrivener works on Mac and Windows, but has no official Linux version. Dammit!

I looked at cross-platform options like Manuskript and Bibisco. Both have their fans, but Manuskript has issues on Windows because the installer triggers a trojan warning (may be false, but why risk it) while Bibisco was just a little too opinionated and strictured when I tried to dive into it that I started getting frustrated with all the steps I had to go through to set up a project. If I was annoyed a few minutes in, I was going to have to put it on the back burner and come back to it when I felt more patient.

So I looked up “Scrivener on Aurora Linux” and found that I could do it with Lutris, a program that makes running games and some other Windows apps easier on Linux. I could download it from the Aurora app store, open it, look up Scrivener in it, and it would get it installed and running with WINE (a system for running Windows apps on Linux).

I thought it couldn’t be that simple. It was. I had it up and running in minutes, license authenticated, and the project I started on Windows available to it via OneDrive, thanks to a popular open source OneDrive client for Linux.

Cloud Storage with Linux

Getting the OneDrive client for Linux set up was WAY more of an adventure because it downloads copies of EVERYTHING (long initial set-up if you have a lot in your OneDrive) and then getting it set up as a service to monitor for changes and automatically sync had some errors I had to look up.

With Linux surpassing 5% of the desktop market, it’s getting harder to excuse that neither Microsoft nor Google has created an official Linux client for their cloud storage services, but have them for Windows and Mac. I expect that from Apple because they’re assholes who intentionally try to keep you dependent on their hardware and software like a domineering, abusive partner. But both Microsoft and Google offer Linux-based cloud desktops in their cloud services and license Windows and ChromeOS for commodity hardware. They should develop Linux clients.

Why Aurora Linux

It’s an immutable distribution based on Fedora and using the KDE desktop. My complaint about Linux has been that its freedom for you to hack your system can also be considered enough rope with which to hang yourself. The primary benefits of an immutable distribution is that it’s a little more secure and more stable. My primary joy is it’s harder to descend into dependency hell. If you don’t know what dependency hell is, you really do not want me to explain it because you’ll never get that innocence back.

For me, it’s had all the UI flexibility I’ve come to love in the KDE Desktop with fewer FML moments with apps and utilities thanks to predominantly using Brew (for commandline apps) and Flatpak (for GUI apps). It’s made me work a little harder to install and configure some favorite apps, but I haven’t broken three by installing one and descending into… you guessed it…dependency hell. At least not so far.

The true test will be when I take it on the road, but at least so far, it’s working nicely.