Open Letter calling out Eve Univerisity Linux Guy

EVE Technology and Research Center Linux
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For the love of bob, please just remove your “Installing_EVE_on_Linux” webpage. Just delete it. You owe apologies, beer, and exotic dancers to every single eve player that wants to play the game and searches google and finds that page.

Your formatting is perfect.
Your goals are true and honorable.
You’ve done good at keeping the link to the launcher binary up to date.

Unfortunately you start line one with CCP Snorlax info, and continue on like nothing has changed.
A moment of silence for Snorlax…the greatest eve developer ever.

… … …

Ok - Snorlax left CCP almost a year and a half ago.
Basic Setup Step 1 is wrong…because Snorlax’s forum post is no longer stickied. Even if it was, it is certainly out of date. It was created over 4 years ago.

Custom Launcher Shortcut section… just why? I know you did this assuming everybody was on ubuntu with desktop environment foo-bar … but we aren’t, and you didn’t even acknowledge this simple assumption in the instructions. Not to mention people are doing this with zero knowledge yet if the game even works, because so far all we’ve done is test the launcher.

Then we start the troubleshooting section…which gets a lot of use and reference because the preceding first half of the instructions were a bit lacking.

Incompatible OpenSSL Library - again … not everybody is on Ubuntu. apt-get doesn’t always work and nor does searching another distro’s repo for libssl1.0.0. Perhaps something even as simple as ‘rpm -i compat-openssl10’ might be useful for a few people. Don’t even get me started on this potentially breaking every week when the launcher updates.

QT Dependencies - So…as the second from the last note we admit that Qt might not work so hot without actually adding Qt from upstream because Ubuntu’s repos might be in the dark ages. I think we probably should have started with this critical dependency as step 1 or 2.

You do add Lutris as a final note, which is super nice and has gotten several people running Eve on linux wonderfully.

Unfortunately you still leave out a lot of things, like corefonts. Text is important mkay?

Eve is 64bit now, a fact not true when snorlax made the linux launcher. Many people still need to pull in VCRUN2010, Dotnet, gecko, etc. There is no mention of dxvk. No mention of steam/proton. No mention of using winetricks.

In some cases you can actually get full shading and full quality, with AA, but not likely following your page.

Instead, following your instructions, a user will end up frustrated and waste 2 hours of their day trying to figure it all out. When they succeed, they still have old wine because we never taught them how to install it, jaggies, poor framerates, and the idea in their head that it was super difficult to achieve.

Seriously just please delete the whole page. You’ve literally walked hundreds of users through the most frustrating process ever to install a simple game.
Gharim Turen has done great work making things smooth.
Steam makes it pretty smooth.
Winetricks makes it pretty smooth.
POL makes it ok.
Lutrix makes it ok.
Deep down, installing updated wine, and doubleclicking the windows installer generally works fine.

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Dog, it sounds like you could make an awesome, up-to-date tutorial. If only there were some sort of wiki page that you could edit…

:slight_smile:

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You see it is like this:
Snorlax the Great made the thing. The thing was holy and good.

Then as time passed, things started to break because maintenance and the passing of time.

The eve uni page shows up in all google searches for eve and linux. I submit the idea that it never should have existed at all. The first line references the forums…which is where the information should have stayed.
authoritative = community maintained forum - just like Snorlax used.
not authoritative - third party dillweed webpage

It just plain needs to go. It was never authoritative, and without a lot of thought and effort won’t be.

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Those are fighting words. You’re talking about my alma matter.

Also, is there an official, up to date guide, because I can’t seem to find one? If so, you can put a line up top of the wiki telling people where to go. And if not, you might want to consider updating the wiki, or making your own guide. Yes, CCP should probably make an official, up-to-date guide, but until they do, it’s on the players to try and help each other out. I don’t know if you have the time, but it sounds like you know your stuff. So you’d probably help a lot of people out if you were so inclined.

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First of all should the Linux Launcher be updated with newer libraries ssl, grpc, and ofc. qt. On Manjaro i can’t use the qt-libs from the distri anymore she crashes the whole client and i can’t debug this mess because i don’t know about which component are guilty for this (i guess qtwebengine). So i’m deliver with my scripts the old qt-libs ver5.11 again :frowning: . On the coming Ubuntu LTS version are QT version 5.12 which are an improvement and works flawless. In the past i have ask a maintainer from the UniWiki about removing some chapters namely qt-dependencies and ssl incompatibilities but it should be stay for historical reasons. There is nothing i can do except working on my script package and deliver it over AUR.

–fly safe

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There will never be an official CCP guide … it isn’t supported.

I’m not much interested in testing a dozen different distros every few months just to keep the guide up to date. Like the guy that fixed his issue the other day by installing VCRUN2019…I really doubt that was required, but yet it somehow fixed his issue. And having that lovenote in the forums is useful. I doubt anybody wants to keep it up to date on the wiki.

My problem, which is why I’m calling to have it taken down entirely, is that it doesn’t know what it is doing:

  1. Is it a detailed guide? If so…well it sucks. Perhaps start of with “I game on Ubuntu xx.xx, this is how it worked as of DD MMM YY” instead of assuming your experience is the same for everybody. Presumably, we can’t even be sure he started from a clean install.
  2. Is it aiming for simplicity? If so…well it sucks. There are easier ways to make this thing go than trying to hamfist a set of instructions for a launcher done 4 years ago by a developer that doesn’t, and never did, get paid for it.

Lets just admit that eve on linux needs a smidge of work. I used the linux launcher for a while. It was alright. Face it, I’m not here for the launcher…and the launcher was the only thing Qt/native. There is no purity to be gained here.

Gharim is awesome. His instructions involve roughly ‘get your drivers right’, and then ‘run my script’.

If you don’t want to trust a rando guy’s script, alternative methods also exist which are easier and more likely to provide success to our space friends. Isn’t the point just to have a space friend on linux?

More to the point for Shipwreck which seems to have some sort of emotional reaction and wants me to fix the ills instead of EveUni… Why would anybody put the effort into a specific guide on the forums when it is absolutely guaranteed that it would only help people AFTER they failed at the eve uni instructions? Seriously…it comes up first in the google searches. People then follow it and half the time get back into windows or giving up.

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Dog, I was just trying to encourage you to make things better. You remind me of an old friend and coworker. He was super smart, and could always see the problems with a plan, SOP, or whatever. But that’s where his input tended to end. He could always see the problems, but never the solution.

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No space friend, you’re just trolling and off topic. This post isn’t here for you to feel happy about solutions. It is here to call attention to a severe problem that is detrimental to the community.

That said, the Original Post references, but does not spell out, several other solutions that we’ve all used.

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OMG! Thank you so much for this post. I am new to linux and have been hitting the brick wall with uni post for the last 48 hours.

Just installed steam and works fine.

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Idk I still use the eve-uni wiki page as reference for installing eve in gentoo, nothing wrong with that page.
Works fine and at least it is easy to find.
:man_shrugging:

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Perhaps a note to the wiki maintainers to update or remove it due to outdated/bad content?
I agree with the OP that the page needs some serious attention.

I first installed Eve under Linux pre-cedega days on Ubuntu. Twas an interesting trip getting things working, and gods help you if you updated your wine package too soon. heh.

Having recently decided to come back, I swirled back through the googleverse of ‘Eve+linux’ to see what new tricks and such were needed these days and saw the E-wiki entry. heh. Fortunately, my first choice was the best one:
Already a steam user, I added the proton 5 tool, and clicked on the install for Eve. Done. No issues with fonts, no problems with gfx. On middling gear, I’m normally maxing 60fps (limited by the monitor I’m using.) Happy Arch Linux camper over here.

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I’ve used the Eve-uni route for several Linux Mint installs, no problem.

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It will probably work, it is not the best way to run eve though.
Like OP said, if you want performance, manually install latest wine & dxvk or simply install and run through steam.

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Hi @Ragnar_STS!

How amusing it was having this thread forwarded to me :smiley:

I’m the main author (not a “Guy” btw, but that’s irrelevant for this lol) of the latest (second) iteration of the uniwiki’s Linux install page, so perhaps I can quell your nerdrage somewhat.

Indeed - this article is heavily outdated. Things like this on Linux has always been pretty dynamic, and require constant attention if they do want to be kept relevant. I originally rewrote that article in 2016 because the original was very outdated, and Snorlax had just released his own Qt-based “native” launcher. I tried to keep it updated over the next couple of years, but ultimately lost interest in the game and so haven’t bothered with it since.

Which leads to the issue that the community seems to have with the uniwiki in general. By and large, the EVE community outside of the university itself has always had some aversion to contributing to the wiki, which has led pages like this to end up as what are essentially personal projects by a particular member - in this case, me - with some little bits here and there from others. People are happy to link to it, rely on it as a ‘bible’ of EVE so-to-speak, but the moment it’s remotely inaccurate, they start calling for blood and Bob forbid they ever cede to contribute anything to it directly.

Having taken a brief glance at the current situation, indeed things like Gharim’s script or Steam with ProtonDB seem like a huge step up in ease of playability nowadays, but as others have pointed out, wikis are a collaborative effort, so anyone (yes, even you!) could maybe add a tag to the top with “Outdated - YMMV”, or take the effort to update it with new information, or even rewrite it entirely if it is deemed necessary - I’m certainly not going to get mad at you if you feel you can do something to improve it.

That said, some of the points you raise seem somewhat misguided, so I felt I better at least address those:
For starters, the ‘Custom Launcher Shortcut’. Ignoring the fact that this section clearly states that it’s entirely optional, these are not Ubuntu-specific by any stretch. .desktop files are a part of the XDG desktop specification and will be used by the vast majority of desktop environments on the vast majority of Linux distributions. Obviously if you are using some obscure hyper-custom setup it may be different, but one assumes that if you are in a position to be doing that, you know how/where to make your own shortcuts.
Again, the section on the OpenSSL libs is indeed Ubuntu-specific, though again this is specifically stated in that section. I (or anyone else) could have taken the time to look into and figure out the particular method of installing the libs on a particular distro, but Ubuntu (or similar Debian-variants) is generally regarded as the distribution most Linux beginners start with. A quick google around will usually happily find you the answer for your own distro (ironically, I use Arch btw™).

So, no, it was never intended to be a 100% “authoritative” guide - it was a place for Linux users to get started. And at the end of the day, the fact that the E-Uni article even shows at the top of google is likely because people, at least at some point, found it useful. If you want to, you could help it be useful again.

Yrael x

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Well said !

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