For Japanese players, you'll want to get your VNs from DLSite as long as it's sold without DRM or only with PlayDRM, which works through WINE. SoftDenchi doesn't work with WINE, so don't buy VNs with that. Also, don't buy VNs from DMM, because they only sell VNs with DRM that doesn't work with WINE. Don't bother buying from Johren.
Mangagamer is one of the very few English localizers that sells a scarce few games with both the Japanese and English text intact. The games I know of that are like this are the Higurashi and Umineko series, and The Expression Amrilato. I recommend buying from them directly, rather than from Steam, because the Steam versions are hard (or impossible) to hook into with Textractor because of DRM, probably. Plus, they're cheaper on Mangagamer, and Steam doesn't like VNs. You can also buy Higurashi from GOG.
Lastly, buy physical releases because the majority of them have no DRM or use AlphaROM, which you can legally bypass by downloading a file from the DRM company on their website. Some physical releases come with DRM that doesn't work with WINE.
Also, if the files/folders are in Japanese, use unar to unarchive it. No other unarchiving tool has a 100% success rate for unarchiving Japanese-encoded text. It's designed for macOS, but some distributions also package and compile it.
This page is the most useful thing I've found for setting up VNs and debugging common issues: https://learnjapanese.moe/vn-linux/
It seems to have been developed on top of this gist from eshrh, which itself was built on top of kamui's gist (no longer exists): https://gist.github.com/eshrh/5bbf4deab58fefdab9eacf77b450efc0
In particular, they mention fjfix for その花びら novels and other furigaya VNs, which is sometimes necessary, sometimes not. It also mentions the SHIFT-JIS character encoding which is required for some novels, which I originally learned of years ago from a reddit post: https://brokendragontranslation.com/shift_jis_linux.html
For some reason, all of the files on that learnjapanese.moe page are re-hosted on Discord, and it doesn't link to the guy who developed fjfix or Broken Dragon Translations, which is kind of odd.
I really wish VNDB listed what DRM a release is encumbered with; that way, you wouldn't need to gamble when you pay for a physical release. The only decent advice I've gotten for finding out if a novel has DRM is to check on EGS: https://erogamescape.dyndns.org
I recommend running Gamescope for games you can't fullscreen, which I needed for some その花びら novels. It's a pretty cool project. It runs even on X.org with a NVIDIA card. The easiest way I found to run Gamescope is to integrate it with Lutris. Cheers to Valve and Sourcehut for developing Gamescope.
That's all for just running VNs. If you're also learning Japanese, here are some additional tips:
- Install Yomichan and a bunch of dictionaries.
- Install Anki and AnkiConnect to make cards quickly.
- animecards.site has a pretty good guide for setting up Anki cards you extract from your VNs.
- Install your VNs in a WINE prefix and install Textractor in the same WINE prefix.
- Install transformers_ocr to OCR text from VNs if you're running them natively or can't hook into them with Textractor. There's Kamui's Gazou as well, which is also based on Tesseract, but I think transformers_ocr is simpler and easier to use.
- Install ames to quickly export audio/images from your VN to your Anki cards.