CCP discontinued official support for Linux in early 2009. A combination of some convenient early technical decisions and extra time by Linux-using devs has allowed Linux to remain surprisingly viable for the last decade, but it is not a supported operating system.
Our current business focus is on Windows and macOS. The change implemented is based on moving from storing tokens in our own home-rolled token storage mechanism to using secure credential storage on the OS itself. This is a significant boon to account security, and the safety of the accounts of our Windows and macOS users is simply a much higher priority than the ability to run on unsupported operating systems.
With that in mind, let’s talk about whether the EVE launcher works on Linux right this second. Because it is not a supported OS, we do not do QA on Linux machines. Occasionally, some ad-hoc testing on personal Linux machines, including my own, takes place, and the last time we did it, both the native and proton environments failed to launch clients.
Since that testing occurred, some fallbacks for credential handling have been implemented to allow for a more robust transition to OS credential storage while reducing the risk of mass-logout problems.
By a happy chance, this means logins are still working under proton, which can run the Windows version of the launcher and has an up-to-date QT application binary. However, it is not working under the native launcher, which has not been updated for around a year, due to certain new dependencies that do not support Linux preventing compilation and thus has an outdated QT binary running the latest webUI.
Those using the native launcher should consider this the end of the road for that avenue of playing EVE under Linux.
once our Mac client does not require wine, that infrastructure will inevitably be torn down.
Fortunately for all Linux gamers, Valve has been doing a fantastic job with proton over the last few years, and at this time, you can use proton to play EVE (I certainly will be!). Key details of my currently functional setup are as follows:
- Ubuntu 18.04
- Proton 5.0-10
- i7-4770-k
- Nvidia RTX 1060
- Kernel 4.15.0-147-generic
I hope this can act as a guide to help others who might be having issues get up and running again for now.