PSA(Public Service Announcement) for Linux Users: only use vanilla wine + winetricks & configure max backups

[neoakris]

I'm sure Linux/Wine users are rare today, but this will become important in the future:

• Every year windows gets more enshitified with privacy invading telemetry, built in borderline spyware, AI, and slowness.
• Every year Linux gets better. In-fact Wine 11 fixed a KeyNote NF on wine specific bug :) (click and drag of tree nodes now works!)

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My PSA (Public Service Announcement) is a Linux User Specific Warning about avoiding potential data loss / .knt file corruption:

• PSA Short version:
  • Only use wine, winetricks, and install instructions on winehq.org's app db (click a version, scroll down to "HowTo / Notes +", click to expand the HowTo / Notes box, and read section with a title like "KeyNote NF 2.1.7.01_x86 Installation Tips for Max Compatibility" (it will tell you what winetricks to use).
  • Linux users should set KeyNote's backup options to the max (They've allowed data recovery for me on 5 different occasions spread across 15 years of using KeyNote NF. 1 was related to dropbox on windows, and 4 were related to Linux oddities.)

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• PSA Long Version / Additional Details:
  • Linux has different flavors of wine & winetricks.
    • (Vanilla) wine: wine & winetricks, are CLI focused, this is basically the "vanilla" (as in unmodified), upstream wine app.
    • Bottles: a free GUI based flatpak app, with a GUI based custom implementation of winetricks, and some additional software sandboxing. (they renamed 'wine prefixes, 'wine bottles', and made them easier to manage with a GUI) (https://usebottles.com/)
      • Around 2024-2025 I tried 'Bottles' (I think with wine version 9 or 10) It resulted in data loss that I was able to manually recover from, but I swore I'd never touch it again after that.
    • Crossover: A licensed GUI based implementation of wine, which is used to fund upstream wine development. (https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover)
      • Around 2024-2025 I tried CrossOver (some versions based on wine 10, which allowed 32bit wine bottles, and worked stablely).
      • Then May 2026 Crossover 26 (which is based on wine 11, stopped allowing 32bit wine bottles / only allows 64 bit wine bottles, since many linux distributions are getting rid of 32 bit wine libraries), gave me dataloss as well. Both an unmodified dead simple install of it, and an install that used their variation of winetricks.
    • (Note a few other variations of wine exist that aren't mentioned here, because those alternative options are gaming focused, I'm only mentioning, bottles and crossover, because those variations are focused on general application compatibility.)
  • I have never experienced data loss (in the form of silently corrupted .knt files), when using (vanilla) wine + winetricks, so it should be considered the most stable option.
    • About the silent corruption of .knt, it involves 2 things:
      • 1st: random tree nodes will disappear random, which is hard to detect / notice if you have a .knt with tons of nodes.
      • 2nd: a note tab can disappear (thankfully this 2nd symptom happens, because after it happens it makes it easier to look for and notice the 1st symptom.)
    • Note I want to make it clear that there's nothing wrong with Bottles or Crossover, both are great projects generally speaking. It's just that KeyNote NF should not be used with those projects, because KeyNote NF's Linux compatibility is heavily tied to winetricks, and those project's winetrick rough equivalent implementations aren't as reliable as upstream wine's winetricks.
  • Some additional details about linux + bottles/crossover specific data corruption & manual recovery are mentioned here:
    https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=43326

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Side Note about Wine Alternatives:

• Alt 1: Installing a Windows VM + RustDesk (remote desktop server in the VM), and RustDesk linux client
  • Pros:
    • It's decent overall, securable, and bug free once setup.
    • free / self-hostable
    • RustDesk's remote desktop client isn't overly bulky compared to other remote desktop solutions.
  • Cons:
    • It doesn't feel like you're running a native app.
    • A correct install is complex and time consuming even if you know what you're doing.
    • comparatively: wine+winetricks is soo much easier, faster to setup, feels native, and works well enough / only has 2 minor issues.
• Alt 2: Seamless Mode with RemoteApp (software installabe on windows PC to configure windows RDP server to function like a remote app instead of a remote desktop)
  • Pros:
    • Decently explained https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qYf-mehpvg
    • As of now several linux projects exist to end to end automate a secure only locally accessible setup of Windows VM. (so the server side is relatively easy to setup.)
  • Cons:
    • It relies on linux's freerdp client, which has always been crazy buggy / glitchy to the point of being unusable, different versions, linux distributions, desktop environments, I've never gotten it to work.
    • I've tried it a few times between 2022-2025 and it's always been too buggy to be remotely usable, I doubt things will improve anytime soon.
• Alt 3: looking-glass.io, which is also mentioned in the above youtube video
  • Cons:
    • I've never tried it as it requires a spare GPU to dedicated to a guest VM in order to work from what I can tell.

[dpradov]

@neoakris, thank you so much for sharing this useful information for Linux users.

I'm not currently a Linux user, but I'm not ruling it out...