Today one of my M.2 drives died.
It means that in the very close future probably the SSD hosting my Win10 dies as well.
Since I wanted to switch to Linux anyway this would be a very good opportunity for doing so.
Regarding this I have some questions.
I wanted to go for a Debian because I worked with this a bit on a homeserver and it was always stable.
What are the steps I need to take to run eve on a barebone debian machine? I know steam worked with this Proton something and it’s good because it brings a lot of compatibility but I don’t want to download steam or run eve via steam if I can avoid it and I’m not sure how the two are linked. Can you get it running without steam or is it hidden behind a steam-wall?
So how would a professional Linux magician setup eve?
but I’m happily trucking along with the Steam variant.
You can still add your existing accounts to the launcher, you’re not married to a specific account for steam, I do have one from years ago but didn’t know it existed til last year, and it had never been used.
You can administer the account in the normal way, just do not attempt to make any sort of plex/pack/etc purchase through steam, do it on eve store instead.
You have to make up your mind how you want to do it. By using a launcher support like lutris or by doing it the classic way. The rough outline will be the same.
For reference i can roughly describe the classic way:
I run debian with nvidia. So first i have to install the nvidia drivers in order to have vulkan ready: https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers
This used to be really simple with debian 11 and i have upgraded from there…so much of the install instructions for debian 12 i have actually not done…like mok enrolling stuff…this is all done automatically. Also i don’t seem to be using dracut and what not. Maybe there is better instructions somewhere.
After that you install wine from winehq, not from debian repos. You will want to use wine staging as long as you don’t run into problems. But if you run into problems, they will be fixed in wine staging at first:
You also need winetricks:
When everything is ready, you can setup the wine environment with:
./winetricks corefonts msdelta vkd3d vcrun2022 dxvk2030
And after that succeeded, run the eve installer and get going.
I avoid Steam and extra launchers due to performance issues. I only have 8 GB RAM on this small box. I recommend you keep your current Windows version and when the time comes, transfer it to the new SSD.
Currently I run Manjaro with XFCE desktop an Arch Linux based distro. Before this I ran Xubuntu which is part of the Debian family of distros. Manjaro out performed Xubuntu in my last testing. Even though you plan to use Debian please read this post.
I can’t speak for how easy it will be to install Debian with Wine. It will come with a software store you should be able to install Wine from there or you might have to drop to Terminal and enter; $ sudo apt install wine
Either way, Wine is all you really need. Proton is what Steam renamed Wine. Proton is their proprietary version of Wine. So no one can download Proton and use it without using Steam. If Wine doesn’t work or has a low version number you might want to visit WineHQ to get the latest version. Manjaro has Wine at version 9.22 while WineHQ is offering 9.0 stable and 10.rc6 development. I recently have issues with alt+tab but I managed a simple workaround here.
Game runs pretty much out of the box on linux if you use Lutris or Steam. I use Lutris and run the game with proton 9. If you’re installing it through Lutris sometimes the community installer script hangs and throws an error: Just cancel the installation and try again until it works, you just have to get lucky after a few tries then it works fine.
Im also on a low end machine and a protip I can give you is you can close the launcher after you have the client started. Closing the launcher clears out like 2-3 gigs of RAM. You can also close Lutris after and just have the client running.
