I’ve been using the Line messaging app for years and sadly, there’s only a Chrome extension to use, once I started using Linux/nixOS
And now these people have decided to end the Chrome extension next month.
I need to use this since I live in Thailand and Line is, by far, the most used messaging app so almost everything.
Line has a Windows and a Mac version so I need to head in this direction.
Obviously Wine is going to be suggested as the number 1 choice for me.
I don’t use Wine (and I’m OK to install it if that’s the only choice) and was wondering whether there are other ways to run a single Windows/macOS app on the desktop.
Otherwise, yeah, short of running it in a VM wine is your only option. Something has to do the translation of Windows API calls and the only project for that is wine. Wine’s improved a lot in recent years, you might not mind it as much.
You could also consider running the android client, I guess.
Yep, seems like I can get it working using Wine.
Now to figure out why the damn window has this crazy thick black outer border and the app is sticky across all workspaces.
Maybe something to do with my tiling i3 window manager.
Anyways, at least some promising progress
There are some wine settings that effect “virtual desktop” things, which may be the source of that border. That, or the application draws its own window in a silly way to avoid decorations that doesn’t play nice with wine’s implementation.
Wine is often quite complex to set up, I’d really recommend writing a script that sets up your wine prefix and installs the exe, so you can repeatedly uninstall (by deleting the prefix) and reinstall your application until you determine the correct setup.
You can also give gamescope a shot, it helps tame crazy window behavior by effectively sandboxing applications in a sub-compositor.
Hello there! I’m also trying to get LINE to work on NixOS – I also was impacted by LY Corporation’s decision to sunset the “ChromeOS” version I’ve been using because of lack of engineering resources. I was wondering whether I could get it to work with Wine first but if that fails I guess I’ll submit a support request or ask my friend who knows someone working there what’s up. Not many people use Linux in Japan…
Anyway, I wasn’t able to get LINE working with Wine. It crashed a few seconds after logging in with the following error message which might or might not be related to the root problem.
02ac:err:combase:RoGetActivationFactory Failed to find library for L"Windows.Media.Transcoding.MediaTranscoder"
What setup do you have? I tried using winetricks vcrun2008 as was recommended by some AskUbuntu posts from a decade ago but I haven’t had any luck. I’m using mkWindowsApp.
This is from an old derivation I used to give me an “application” which would just launch the Chromium extension.
In 2022 when Line Corporation dropped Line Lite support—the app with ‘only’ text, voice/video calls, dark mode, & stickers (what else you need?) that was tenfold smaller with only 1 tracker listed on Exodus—I didn’t “upgrade to the full version” where the Chromium extension lasted without a “linked account” for 1–2 months before I was denied access to the account. Line, like the other mobile-first encrypt chat apps like WhatsApp & Signal, require a Android/iOS duopoly device to be the primary device with encryption keys to function. At which point & seeing the Chromium extension even at that point hadn’t received any updates in ages, I said screw this application & the direction that the company was going—the writing was on the wall that is was going to move to proprietary platforms only. With foresight, I copy-pasted a text explaining the situation & how to contact me to many folks.
There are some gateways/bridge to other protocols, but Line doesn’t mind breaking its protocol so unless you know a mantainer (or yourself) is ready to diligently prioritize reversing the protocol—not just for compatibility but security—it is not going to be long-term sustainable (see libpurple).
All this to say, I have been without Line for 3 years & have been okay in Thailand despite the ultimately just minor inconvenience. Folks can use a different form to contact me—XMPP, Signal, email, or call. Especially with email since everyone has an account, you can usually still make it work even if most folks treat their inbox as a password recovery/spam repository. If you don’t like the direction Line Corporation is going, just know that “saying no” is an option.
I’m not quite there yet.
I’m using Bottles for the ease of use of the GUI. I’m going to add in gamescope as suggested previously.
I will say though, you probably should use a v8 of the Windows app and not the latest v9
v8 will work except for the huge outside border issue which, with any luck, gamescope may fix
Good luck and come back with any successes to share as I’m sure others will benefit
Unfortunately, I’m in Japan where LINE is quite ubiquitous for not only most of the people I know but also for businesses who use it for their online line service and related things… I wish I had that option
Where can I download it from? I already had trouble finding the installer I have now since it seems they only offer a UWP version now from the Microsoft Store which is really just wrapping the old one.
you can get versions here - Older versions of Line (Windows) | Uptodown
i used 8.7.0 Build 3302 which seems to be functional as far as I can see. waiting to rid myself of the border before dropping the chrome extension but seems to be working pretty good
It’d be so nice if this were generally true, but as an almost total hermit myself, plenty of people and corportations aren’t willing to accomodate me to that degree.
It’s fine if you have an established social circle and both an independent income and general living situation, but not everyone is (or stays) in that position. It’s quite difficult to even just rent without these walled gardens in some places; Kakao and Wechat have been the worst offenders I’ve come across.
But yeah, it’d be great if people stopped giving total control of their social lives to proprietary applications. The more who resist the better. It just sucks if you suddenly find yourself between the cracks, ask me how I know…
Don’t these Matrix bridges typically violate TOS? I remember there was a lot of controversy around the Beeper app which used this method and got into major disputes with Apple, Meta, etc.
Yes, and often copyright (in some countries), since the API is usually not reverse engineered without peeks at the original software.
Not that I care much, both of these things only protect anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices here. You’re also quite likely breaking TOS using wine FWIW.
Since you can’t compete with the client of a walled garden with an established userbase without interoperability. It’s why those bridges exist, to give other platforms a fighting chance.
It’a also probably why these platforms restrict things in the first place, owning quasi-monopolies is good when you can get away with it; Complexities of monetizing cloud software aside, if it didn’t have that side effect surely you’d want to offer as much interoperability as possible to improve user experience and widen the userbase by letting people develop clients for platforms you don’t support. Y’know, developing the best product for the widest userbase, rather than trying to prevent others from competing with you by artificially increasing switching costs.
Not just my opinion either, the EU has introduced legislation that will make these kinds of TOS illegal and in fact make offering a public API mandatory for chat applications, precisely for this reason - sadly it will only come into effect many years from now, and I’m sure will be watered down in some way.
Both can get you banned, if the platform decides to levy a vendetta against your particular means of dodging their platform lock-in. Wine is quite detectable. You can also get banned for no discernable reason, and have little recourse whether there was a legitimate reason or not. Yet another reason why in an ideal world we’d stop giving total control of our social lives to proprietary applications.
Either way, this is well off-topic, I was just listing options, not demanding anyone switch to a matrix bridge. Use whatever you’re personally comfortable with.
Thank you for your thoughtful response! I agree with you that in an ideal world messaging standards would have developed similar to email standards such that clients are all interoperable. However, that didn’t happen, and companies made significant investments to create various walled garden ecosystems. Doing this kind of “rollback” is extremely complex, and I’m curious to see if/how the EU will eventually implement this proposal. As interesting as I find this discussion, I agree that this is off topic for this thread!
I think the legal & historical context is on topic since it provides some measure of what might be reasonable in the mid–long term for the “messaging app suggestion”. I’m glad y’all did bring it up.
In the mid-2000–early-2010s, we had (& still have) XMPP as a standard, but tech giants utterly killed its momentum. I don’t think there is any incentive to play ball together once a critical user base is amassed, & letting the cabal create yet another new standard they agree on is going to be worded in a way that they can still carve out a walled garden .
It’s unfortunate that to many it is impractical to tap out / boycott—especially if your business / other businesses buy into this stuff like LINE, WhatsApp, WeChat, et. al.
I wrote a Nix package for LINE some time ago. I just updated it to version 9.2
X11/XWayland only; Does not render properly on Wayland (Hyprland).
I don’t think it’s possible to send stickers.
I did notice a fuzzy border around the windows on Hyprland. It’s not too bad though.
I’m using the WineWow base package, and winetricks to enable Windows 10 mode.
The LINE installer runs non-interactively, but it doesn’t install LINE fully. It’s the installed launcher that actually finishes the installation and then runs line. Not much can be done about that.
Sorry for the late reply, but thank you for sharing! For some reason, despite checking out your repository (I put in this PR) I still didn’t see that. I will try it out, but the version I linked above suddenly started working recently (though it is based on your work anyway). However, on Wayland KDE Plasma the black border is still there.
.