We’ve been working on a guide to help players on all major GNU/Linux distributions play visual novels for the past few weeks. The main focus is on getting Japanese-only visual novels to work, because they tend to be much quirkier.

This guide is designed to be used by both beginners and experts, with minimal need to touch the command line.

openSUSE wins the award for “never had to touch the terminal” and “simplest setup instructions”, but Fedora is a close second.

While there are a few existing visual novel guides for GNU/Linux around, we’ve tried to fill in the gaps we noticed. We’ve put a lot of research into this guide and ensured it is accurate while remaining simple and approachable.

If you’re interested, start here!

We have an extensive Troubleshooting section on our Problems page if you’re having trouble getting visual novels to work, too.

I wrote this guide with a lot of help from two other people, including /u/[email protected]. It’s available on our community wiki, https://wiki.comfysnug.space/. As with all pages on our wiki, it’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, meaning you’re free to share, remix, and build on the content as long as you credit us.

We also have some other pages you may find useful:

• If you’re looking for something to play, check out our Recommendations page.
• If you want to know where and how to buy a visual novel you want to play, our comprehensive Buying page will help you out.
• And if you want to read a visual novel in Japanese, our Reading in Japanese page offers a lot of advice and points you to some useful software to make the process easier.