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5 reasons you should ditch Windows for Linux today (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 1 week ago by Sunshine@piefed.social to c/linux@programming.dev

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[-] aeharding@vger.social 2 points 1 week ago

Stupid insta360 software >:(

[-] Playgroup_Gristle_360@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Oh boy my time to shine. Took me a while but I finally got Insta360 Studio working smoothly in Bottles on Linux with GPU acceleration. All credit goes to this github repo https://github.com/SveSop/nvidia-libs.

download nvidia-libs-0.8.1.tar.xz from https://github.com/SveSop/nvidia-libs
unzip it
- the zip includes a bottles_setup.sh script, you can try it and see if it works, but it didn't work for me so I had to use the manual method detailed as follows
copy the extracted nvidia-libs-0.8.1 folder to $HOME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/
- this is just copying it to a location inside the Bottles flatpak sandbox, so we can access it inside the Flatpak command shell that we use later
go to Bottles > Preferences > Runners
install kron4ek-wine... runner (not the proton one)
create a new Bottle:
- Name: Insta360
- Environment: Gaming
- Runner: soda
after creation, go to Insta360 bottle > Settings:
- DXVK: Disabled
- VKD3D: Disabled
- Discrete Graphics: Enabled
(optional) at this point feel free to close Bottles and disable internet for Bottles if you are really paranoid about privacy and don't want the Insta360 Studio sending telemetry. You can disable internet for Bottles entirely using Flatseal, or use the experimental option inside Bottles to disable internet specifically for the Insta360 bottle
then in terminal, enter a shell inside the Bottles flatpak sandbox: flatpak run --command=bash com.usebottles.bottles
enter the folder you copied from step 3: cd $XDG_DATA_HOME/bottles/nvidia-libs-0.8.1
set variable pointing to the folder corresponding to your Insta360 bottle: export WINEPREFIX=$(realpath ../bottles/Insta360)
set variable pointing to the soda runner: export PATH=$(realpath ../runners/soda-9.0-1/bin):$PATH
- exact folder name depends on the version of soda you used in step 6
run the installer script ./setup_nvlibs.sh install
back in the Bottles flatpak, go to the Insta360 bottle settings and switch to kron4ek-wine... runner
- as for why I didn't start with the kron4ek-wine... runner from the start, it's because I had trouble running the setup_nvlibs.sh script in step 13 when I tried to point to the kron4ek-wine... path in step 12, so I started with the soda runner instead
run the Insta360 Studio installer inside the Insta360 bottle
open Insta360 Studio inside the Insta360 bottle, go to Preferences, and if hardware acceleration is enabled by default then everything should be working!

Note: You'll want to put all 360 files in the Bottles Flatpak sandbox at $HOME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/Insta360/. This way Insta360 Studio will be able to see them. Exported files will end up in the sandbox as well.

I actually did this all in a VM with GPU passthrough, and then made a backup of the entire VM. This way I'll always have a working copy of Insta360 Studio, even if newer versions of Linux or Bottles stop supporting it.

Tested on:

Fedora Bluefin 42
Bottles runner: kron4ek-wine-10.8-amd64
nvidia rtx gpu
Insta360 Studio version: 5.6.1

References:

[-] aeharding@vger.social 4 points 1 week ago

Hey thanks so much for this! Is the nvidia stuff needed if I don't have an nvidia GPU? I have integrated (Radeon 700M) and I see the Insta360 startup splash, but after that the bottle stops. :(

[-] Playgroup_Gristle_360@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago

Aw shucks I don't know anything about AMD, sorry. I doubt any of the nvidia-libs related stuff would do anything on AMD. I did learn a bunch of troubleshooting tips while trying to get it working though, hopefully they can help:

as always, check system logs. You can use journalctl in the terminal (look online for more tips, like how to filter for a specific time range), or your distro might come with a GUI (Gnome and KDE both have one, though the Gnome one is much easier to use imho)
Insta360 Studio has log files, you can find them in the bottle sandboxed filesystem, pretty sure it was under AppData, so the path on the host would look something like $HOME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/Insta360/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/...
in the Bottles flatpak, after installing Insta360 Studio in the bottle, next to the Insta360 Studio shortcut there should be a triple-dot menu with some options, try clicking "Launch with Terminal" so you can see the terminal logs as the application is launching
- though for some reason I noticed that on Bluefin this option doesn't work...in that case maybe try running the entire Bottles flatpak from the terminal: flatpak run com.usebottles.bottles, though I haven't tried this specifically
try running tools like GPU_Caps_Viewer and GPU-Z inside the same Bottle to see if they detect the GPU, and what capabilities they report (for the Nvidia GPU you need the CUDA capability, not sure what might be needed for AMD)
search for Insta360 Studio under https://appdb.winehq.org/, see if anybody else reported getting it working on AMD, and how they did it
in Bottles, try different runners, like the proton runner or the caffe runner
ask an AI like ChatGPT or Gemini, the ones with web search access are pretty good at solving Linux issues from what I've heard

Unfortunately this is just as tedious as it sounds. I hate trying to get Windows software running in Linux (aside from games, those generally work and you can just check protondb for support). Luckily Insta360 Studio was the last remaining software that I still needed a Windows VM, so once I finally figured it out I could retire Windows for good.