I love Scrivener. It’s one of my favorite bits of writing software for long-form writing.

I also love Linux. Particularly, I love Debian running with KDE Plasma. If I can help it, it’s the only OS I use at work, school, and home.

But Scrivener doesn’t make a Linux version. Let’s fix that. This tutorial assumes you know a bit about the Linux terminal. These commands are tested at the time of posting on a fresh install of Debian 12.

This tutorial is a recently upgraded version of the tutorial on Keyboard Playing that got me started but did not work all the way for me.

Download Scrivener

Visit the Scrivener Download Page and obtain the most recent Windows version.

Install Wine

Run the following commands to install Wine and its corequisites:

sudo apt-get install wine winetricks winbind

Set Up Your Wine Prefix

This assumes Scrivener will use the one-and-only Wine prefix on your device. If you don’t know what that means, you’re probably safe. Otherwise, make sure to specify winetricks prefix=___ when you run these steps.

winetricks corefonts
winetricks win10
winetricks dotnet48
winetricks sapi

This installs core Windows fonts, sets up a Windows 10 environment, installs Microsoft Dot Net 4.8, and provides a substitute for the now-outdated speechsdk requirement. When dialog boxes pop up, just accept all the default values.

Install Scrivener

You’re just about there!

cd ~/Downloads
wine Scrivener-installer.exe

That should be it! Scrivener should be accessible from a search in your application launcher, or it may even have created a desktop shortcut for you.

Disclaimer & Conflicts of Interest. I am in no way affiliated with Scrivener or Literature & Latte. I received a discount on my purchase of a Scrivener 3 license due to my status as a university student. This discount may affect my perception of the quality of the program.