Bit dramatic title.
tl;dr the article is wrong, Bartenders assessment is wrong, It was a one line fix in wine, everything is fine
I have played EVE on Linux for over a decade. Actually I never played it on Windows ever, because my last Windows was 98SE. The supported client was absolutely horrible, I used it for a week or so before switching to wine. The Snorlax Launcher was nice, but was soon abandoned, and it became cumbersome to install and update DXVK manually in the prefix, so I witched to wine again.
So for the whole time I was playing EVE, the working solutions came always out of the community.
Now, about the whole CCP Bartender quote that seems to cause the whole drama. The thread with the quote can be found here New launcher... new Linux error?
I’m not sure how he made the assessment when saying that. Probably because this is what they changed and then he just assumed wine doesn’t support it. He was completely wrong. Even a quick glance at the wine sources showed that this functions where in fact implemented.
You can find the whole history in the thread. Some people found out very quickly, even before Bartender wrote that it still worked with older wine versions. Bartender shrugged this away as some quirk that will soon stop to work.
What essentially turned out to be the issue was if I can recollect that correctly, the crypto lib CCP was using relying on some undocumented behavior and using a lib they don’t explicitly load. Wine has a similar behavior but it was changed a while back and that is why older versions still worked. Since this was a regression and wine is about emulating even the undocumented quirks this was reverted again.
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51465
https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/commitdiff/2b3a300cbfee15dd6771a0a984c13591a2b36358
Within a week the patch was in a new wine release and the Launcher was working again.
So here is what Linux Community Support looks like:
- Launcher broke on Linux
- Within a day we had 3 different workarounds, pick one and you can play again.
- Downgrade wine to older version
- Use the old Linux Launcher or downgrade the Windows Launcher
- Play on Steam and use Proton 5.0
- Within a week @Renard_DuGaulle and @Lycan_King_Tawate debuged and fixed the issue in wine
- Within two weeks the fix was in a new wine release and everything was working again
So this kind of thing isn’t a one time event, I have seen something like this play out multiple times over the years. The Linux community can support it self, thank you very much. The only thing the community asks of CCP is to not intentionally make this more difficult than it has to be.
Another thing that came out of this is a fix to an upstream library CCP uses that caused the initial issue. An interesting read if you are curious how responsive CCP is to those things: Load msvcrt explicitly when not loaded by Algebro7 · Pull Request #1062 · weidai11/cryptopp · GitHub