Switching to Linux, what do I do now with Eve?

This thread is an experience.

The official CCP position on linux: We don’t support linux.

What does that mean: It means that officially, zero thought goes into how things support linux. Hypothetically speaking, if an anti-cheat system started being triggered by linux, that anticheat system would not be adjusted on company time.

Unofficially: I also stripped windows out of my personal life about 5 years ago, and I want to continue playing eve. So under this hypothetical situation I would probably spend some personal time attempting to fix such an issue, but any fix would have to work without undermining robust anti-cheat on our supported platforms, which are mac and windows. So you’ve got an insider, but I have to respect that linux is not supported and be careful not to cause issues on the supported platforms.

Silver lining: linux maintenance has required probably less than 20 hours of my time over the last two or so years, because we use wine on mac as well, so the official time spent on the mac launcher and client translates very strongly to linux as well. On top of that, by happy coincidence historical technical decisions make the eve client extremely amenable to wine. Of course, I’m only maintaining it as far as “works on my machine” because of the distro fragmentation problems others mentioned, but generally speaking if it can be made to run on the current ubuntu LTS, it can be made to run elsewhere. So the linux community stays afloat through teamwork and collaboration, and you can usually find info on how to make it work on any distro that isn’t crazy obscure.

But when we get right down to brass tacks, there’s no guarantees. None. Maybe linux will stop working tomorrow. If that doesn’t work for you (and it’s not unreasonable for you to say it doesn’t), then I would suggest playing as Alpha, possibly rolling a new account for it if you’re really concerned.

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