Dude, EVE was officially supported on Linux way back. Support came in the same time Mac support came.
Both official Mac and Linux graphics quality and performance where abysmal compared to the Windows version under Wine. Most peoples using Linux did use Wine + Windows EVE Premium version instead of the official version because official mac/Linux where “classic graphics (they where the difference between 2004 graphics and 2010ish)”.
That’s the reason CCP don’t support officially Linux. Not because they don’t want, but because using Wine was/is sooooo superior and as most Linux user did have a brain and know how to use Wine and like no one where using the official client, CCP simply ditched it and kept that unofficial support. Even now the unofficial Linux way is way better than the Mac official version (we have Vulkan, 3 times the fps, half the power usage and dx11 gfx)…
That is that simple. there is no reason to spend money on an official supported version if it’s to be inferior on performance and graphics quality, than a community supported one. Especially when no one use that official version.
The other proof that I can give that Crowd Control Productions want to keep there Linux user is that one : In the good old time (that I miss by the way), it was possible to simply run exefile.exe instead of eve.exe to land on the login screen that was “in game” instead of using the launcher to login. CCP did have a launcher for Windows and Mac for YEARS and waited until they released an unofficial Linux version of the launcher and until it was tested by many peoples before removing that way of login via exefile.exe, they literally keep that way of login for us, Linux users.
CCP care about Linux user, and they do test it on Linux on there side (some dev do, I can guarantee it). But they can’t beat community support, especially like many mentioned, on a platform where ABI change constantly and that everyone run something different, kind of. Plus they save money and can’t get accountable if something fail.
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.
Thank you, not only for working on this, but for this rather great post.
I’m seriously thinking of switching back to Linux as well, I have two programs that complicate this, Eve and ZBrush. With your post I feel a lot better about one of them.
