simplest explanation is that it’s for people who want to game on Linux and use Linux with minimal configuration and tinkering. It just has a lot of sane defaults like:

• Nvidia drivers and Steam pre-installed
• Flatpak for apps (installing packages is discouraged since doing so recklessly can break your system)
• “immutable” core (this is harder to explain but basically it makes it very hard to break your system)
• background updates with easy rollback in case something goes wrong (just be warned that by default you can only rollback to the previous state, nothing older than that)
• Wayland
• advanced tools in case you need them (docker, podman, distrobox, ujust scripts, brew, DX mode)
• active community to provide help and support

I’ve been able to get LunaTranslator to hook into a visual novel by running them both in the same Bottle. Textractor worked in the past too. Not sure about other types of games though, I’ve only tested a few visual novels. And getting the visual novel itself working in the Bottle can be a bit of a crapshoot. So far I’ve had luck using the soda runner for my Bottles, and then in the Bottle settings, add the environment variable LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8 and set the language to “Japanese”.

If you just want translation then LunaTranslator should be enough, but I do sentence mining, so I have LunaTranslator and a VN running inside a Bottle, and LunaTranslator connecting to RenjiXD texthooker page (running in a browser outside Bottles) using the websocket method (in LunaTranslator enable “network service”, then in RenjiXD texthooker page settings connect to ws://localhost:2333/api/ws/text/origin, more info here). Then I can scan words using Yomi-tan and add them to my Anki flashcards. I did have to write some hacky scripts to add screenshots and audio to my flashcards as well, if anybody is interested I can share them.

By the way, in case you are interested, I do have a hacky script that lets me use keyboard shortcuts to attach screenshots and audio recordings to my anki cards. Just be warned that it is QUITE hacky, especially since I use a Fedora Atomic distro.

At least from my research, Kinoite is Wayland. I think you can go to KDE (Plasma) settings, find the “About this System” page and it should say “Graphics Platform: Wayland”. GNOME and KDE are desktop environments, X11 and Wayland are display managers (I think of them like rendering engines).Though it’s true that Spectacle has issues on Wayland, apparently all screenshot apps do, due to security restrictions and slow development. But Spectacle works great on KDE because Spectacle is made by KDE, and gets special privileges when run on KDE desktop. Same with GNOME screenshot when run on GNOME desktop. Third-party screenshot tools don’t get these privileges and don’t work well on either (at least when using Wayland), you can read more about it here: https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip/issues/727.

As far as Textractor goes, I haven’t had any issues with text hooking, but from my experience it heavily depends on the game, and I’ve only tested 2 games on linux so far. But if I’m reading you correctly…are you using Firefox inside WINE?

A fellow Japanese learner and VN enjoyer! Are you on Linux? I ran into issues with Lap Clipboard Inserter not capturing any clipboard events when the window was in the background, and I think it’s an issue with Wayland, since all firefox-based browsers had the same issue but chromium-based ones didn’t