Windows "Recall" and Linux

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
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I recently found out that MS will be integrating a new AI application in Windows 11 called Recall (i’m currently using Scrivener 3 on Windows 11 - my bad) From what i’ve heard, this new MS malware’s main focus will be to take screen shots every few minutes and store them in some kind of database (accessible to whom??) so that the user can “search” for past work in the form of screen shots or content more easily. Really??? Something about having bridges to sell comes to mind.

Anyway, long story short, even before this happens, i will be uninstalling Windows permanently from my laptop and working strictly with Linux.

However, when i inquired recently about a new Scrivener 3 version for Linux on these forums, the response was more of a mocking than anything useful.

Most respondents say that you can run Scrivener for Windows under Linux with Wine or a VM. After trying unsuccessfully many times to install and run my LICENSED version of Scrivener for Windows on Linux Mint 21.3, first trying Wine, then trying Bottles and finally trying Lutris. I have realized that it’s just a sucker’s game. Every Linux distro and Windows emulator has its own dependencies and quirks and is extremely sensitive to a hundred different factors and I’m not going to waste my time trying all the permutations and combinations to try to get it to work anymore. Besides, another update will most likely kill it again.

If you actually installed Scrivener 3 under Wine, Bottles or Lutris AND you got the licensing to work, then you’re one of the lucky ones. Your combination of version of Linux and Wine emulator is golden. For these people, i dare you to install Linux Mint 21.3 and Wine, Bottles or Lutris and then try reinstalling Scrivener for Windows 3 WITH LICENSING working. Go ahead and try it.

I will not spend one femtosecond longer on trying to install Scrivener 3 on Linux and i will very shortly stop using Scrivener on Windows as well. I’m done.

In any case, i’ve been moving to Linux (can’t stand Mac) and only using Windows (can’t stand it even more) to use Scrivener, otherwise i use Linux with my laptop for everything else. The only app i haven’t ported yet to Linux Mint is Scrivener 3.

After literally spending hours and hours trying to install Scrivener on Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia and failing, i need to ask one very last time if there will be any native Linux version of Scrivener 3 forthcoming in the very near future. If not, no worries. I 've heard the mantra before - “business model, business model, business model, business model…”.

I have already started the process of copying all of my novel and research onto my laptop’s hard drive for porting to a native Linux novel writing application. There are a few Linux novel writing apps out there, some paid which i’m going to focus on, but i’ve been holding out hope for a native Linux version of Scrivener 3.

QUESTION: Can i get my money refunded partially or in full for the Windows version of Scrivener that i bought? How do i go about this? Thanks.

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I’m not an L&L official, but I don’t see why you should qualify for a refund? Scrivener seems to be working just fine on your current version of Windows. And Linux was never an officially supported platform. Those recommendations you are referring to are just fellow Scrivener enthusiasts trying to get it to work for them.

Btw, Microsoft has at least “delayed” the Recall feature due to public outcry and promised that, should it ever come, it would be opt-in. So you can continue to enjoy using Scrivener on Windows at least for the time being.

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Why? Recall has been recalled as the embarrassment of the year.
What makes you think other corporates won’t try the same thing?
You’ve been asked for years, turn on/off this that and the next thing if you don’t like it. Do you even bother? Does anyone ever bother? The right to privacy is the biggest fallacy of the past two decades. They already know everything about you… and you.

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Cymatics -

First, I feel your frustration. I wish there was a Linux native version of Scrivener 3. I’ve made a couple of tutorial videos on getting Scrivener running with license activation using both Bottles and Lutris. Unfortunately the Bottles method which worked great in April/May of 2024 was broken by June of 2024. That prompted me to make a Lutris tutorial which is still working for most people as far as I know. I actually made that tutorial on a Linux Mint machine. I’m currently retesting the Bottles tutorial as I believe I’ve found the problem thanks to a commenter on these forums. If everything runs smoothly I’m going to make an updated Bottles tutorial which I honestly believe will be more reliable. After that I’m going to make a straight WINE tutorial as well. Anyway, I get that you are frustrated and don’t want to mess around with these types of things anymore, but in my experience when it fails it is the activation piece 90% of the time that trips us up. If L&L could even provide a manual activation process for those of us on Linux that would solve it. And that should be a really easy thing for them to do.

But, since you mentioned Linux native apps. I’m currently writing my novel (at least the next few chapters) in a program called Manuskript, which I’m making a review video about. So far my experience has been that it is quite useable with a few tweaks to the settings. Perhaps it will be an option for you. My main gripes are that the user interface is not as polished or intuitive as Scrivener 3 and that the editor doesn’t have the formatting toolbar. That’s not a deal breaker as I mainly just want to italicize certain things and I can just highlight and press CTRL+i.

Lastly, if you are outside the refund window of your purchase I can just about guarantee you won’t see a penny of a refund. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I hope you find something that works well for you. If you don’t mind working in webapps, Atticus is decent except on mobile phones and I hear great things about Dabble, but it is expensive.

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I understand your situation and I agree with you. But your hotheaded attitude won’t help change the situation. Calm down, man.

I have also used Linux Mint for several years. I only consider two options feasible:

  1. Install Scrivener 3 on a Windows virtual machine. Follow the normal process and disconnect the internet to prevent Windows from doing its thing.

  2. Use the old, free version with no expiration period. It can be easily found in Appimage format and is legal. This is what I have used since then, waiting for a future version for Linux, which I would be happy to buy.

Don’t listen to the mockery of those who comment to annoy, but don’t think that those who think differently are trying to bother you.

Only the company’s official response matters. Maybe, after the current project that Literature and Latte has in hand, they will once again consider the proposal of launching a native version for Linux.

PS: Send me a PM if you need anything.

Regards.

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A right cannot be a fallacy because a right belongs to the field of legality and a fallacy belongs to the field of dialectics.

You can argue that the right to privacy does not exist in practice, but that does not imply that such a right does not exist as a concept. As users and citizens, we have the legitimate power to defend our rights. This conformist attitude only encourages and leads to the excesses that we see every day.

Regards.

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My point is the right to privacy was already eroded before the horse left the gate. Those defending their right are flogging a dead horse. I stick to what I have observed.

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Thank you. You are, of course, correct about the refund. I was thinking “it couldn’t hurt t ask”…

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Hi Adgalloway, Thank you for your informative response! So it’s you who has made these great Youtube tutorials! Greetings and Many Thanks! I just tried your Lutris tutorial a few days ago but the installation got hung up and i couldn’t get it to work, but that’s OK. I will keep looking for your new Tutorials, including Bottles and Lutris and i will try again.

In the meantime, i will look at Manuskript and try it out and i’ll also take a look at Dabble again.

Thanks again.

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Thank you very much for your suggestions. :slightly_smiling_face:

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@dirkhaun, as he said, does not speak for Literature & Latte.

Refunds are available within 30 days of your original purchase. Please open a support ticket, here, and include a copy of your receipt.

Regarding the “Recall” feature, apparently it requires hardware support (specifically, a dedicated AI processor) and therefore will not be universally available. If your hardware doesn’t support it, Microsoft not only won’t, but can’t enable it stealthily.

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Thank you for your response. I won’t be asking for a refund as i’ve been using Scrivener for a little while now.

Also thanks for the update n Recall.

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Cymatics
If the tutorials you’ve found are on The Linux Author channel, then yes, that’s me.

If you get a wild hair and want to try again. I have just tested out the Bottles method and gotten it to work and activate (on Fedora). The process is identical to what is in my current Bottles tutorial with one small change: At the point you create the bottle and get to choose a type, choose “custom” instead of “application” then add the following three dependencies: “Allfonts” “Dotnet48” and “Gecko” after that just continue on with the tutorial like normal including deleting the “texttospeech” folder and all should be right with the world (I hope :slight_smile: )

If you look in the comments on that video, I gave these instructions to a person with the username Grunfeld earlier today. The only other thing I would add is that if you decide to give this a go, I’d recommend uninstalling Bottles and deleting all associated data. Your package manager may give you an option to delete data or you can navigate to the Home/.var/app folder and delete the com.Bottles folder. Then reinstall Flatpak Bottles fresh. That will give you the best shot at a clean slate install.

Whichever way you decide to go with it, good luck to you.

TG

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i need to ask one very last time if there will be any native Linux version of Scrivener 3 forthcoming in the very near future. If not, no worries. I 've heard the mantra before - “business model, business model, business model, business model…”.

Nobody from L&L said anything like “business model”, just to be clear about it. That was a bunch of off-topic backseat cheerleading for other operating systems, from what I saw. Our reason has always been logistics and the Windows version being behind. With one programmer, there was and still is to a degree a need to focus on getting the software done, before branching back out again.

So nothing soon, but I would never rule it out. I am a Linux user after all, and I would also like to some day use our own software on my operating system without virtual machines and whatnot. I also have very little interest in using Mac or Windows. The Mac was pretty good about 15 years ago (it even shipped with Apache and PHP out of the box, and you could write native Python and Ruby GUIs in their development package, to illustrate how far it has fallen); it was not too bad about 10 years ago, though it had lost most of what made it feel like a real UNIX; now though… it’s bad for how I use a computer, and getting worse every year. Windows, I don’t even know where to start with a system I can’t pipe a find command’s results through sed, or whatever, maybe even some script I wrote. How does anyone use that? :laughing:

Lastly, if you are outside the refund window of your purchase I can just about guarantee you won’t see a penny of a refund.

Refunds are 30 days, as stated in the FAQ, no questions asked. We don’t care if it’s because it doesn’t work on a platform that isn’t technically supported, or because you disliked the icon. That in combination with the 30 day demo means anyone should have more than enough time to figure out if it’s what they want, or if it will work on their configuration.

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This post puts me a bit in mind of my own raging post days years ago. Oh boy am I glad I’m over it.

I have not heard about this Recall? You make it sound rather ominous. There was a time I would have dismissed it as conspiracy theory. But the world has changed, and not for the better. I’ll worry about it when it actually hsppens. As for a lack of privacy, who knows I may have a camera on me as I type this. Or maybe when I peed earlier. Or maybe my phone is sending tracking data to someone somewhere. Or maybe Alexa is listening to everything. (She’s going to be powerful bored if she is.) No way of knowing. If I worry or perseverate on things like that, I’ll go nuts. No thank you. I’m nuts enough already.

I would also love to see Scrivener on Linux, and yes I would be willing to buy it all over again for that. But L&L seems to be pretty open and transparent in these forums, and if I read them right, it won’t be happening any time soon. They’ve given us a couple of good products and they aren’t even doing that monthly subscription everyone else is. They could, and they’d rake it in, but they’re not. I am thankful.

The Honorable Thomas A. McKean
Author, Soon Will Come the Light: A View From Inside the Autism Puzzle
Winner, Literary Achievement Award, 1994
Written not on Scrivener, but on WordStar and a Kaypro 4/84 CP/M computer with all of 64k memory.

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‘Backseat cheerleading’ - really?

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@AmberV – it seems that the problem is the licencing system, and I wonder if there is anything more L&L can do to try to solve this with them?

One off-the-wall suggestion and one with dubious legality: use the pirated version. You have bought a licence, but the licence provider (not L&L software itself) conflicts with your preferred OS. During my PhD many years ago, we used to always buy Adobe Suite every release as we had to have all software licences verified by our University; but we would install the “liberated” version as it was more reliable[1] and easy to automate the install across machines. Honestly, the protection mechanism was hurting us, the legal software licencee/owner (however a software purchase may be construed). It sounds like something similar is happening to several Scrivener + Linux users.

[1] we had the licenced version “unlicence” itself more than once , even during a critical deadlines. Adobe support was useless, so we took the approach we did.