Elite:Dangerous for Linux?

[Digit]

going slightly demented craving linux version

:? what are our options as linux users to play elite: dangerous ?

wine ~
currently "garbage" report on winehq

virtual windows ~
involves an install of windows, reduced performance, unlikely able to use fancy peripherals

dual boot a windows (or mac in three months) ~
ack, there's got to be a better way...

i'm balls deep in linux for over a decade now. i lost count how many distros i've tried somewhere in the several~hundreds. i now use the like of exherbo, gentoo, debian-sid, arch, slackware in bedrocklinux. (yes, bedrocklinux!)

and i reeh-heeh-heeh-heeeally dont want to infect my computer with windoze. i ran from it for a long list of reasons, all of which still stand, accompanied by new reasons added in the decade+ of using GNU|Linux(*100s), (ic)AROS, ('dragonfly|open|free")BSD, Open Solaris, Minix, GNU|Hurd, enjoying freedom which only further contrasted and confirmed the validity in going out of my way to avoid M$ windoze.

hooooowever...

i've been waiting for this game since playing Frontier: First Encounters in the mid 90s as a young teen.

...

.... no please, please, i really dont want to install windows. :.(

like the "no offline" wasnt punch-in-the-gut enough... eesh.

no... i knew this was coming... it was the mere whiff of a mention of looking into a linux version later, and elite's track record for being widely poly-platform, and my established faith in Braben, to inspire a faith ((that a linux version will come)) to carry me through the storm (until the linux version comes)...

... much to the jaw drops of my friends already playing (i could be too, i backed enough to be playing months ago, but waiting until they say it's good enough to be in a box arriving on my doorstep), i might just hold out even longer for the merely suggested (mere possibility of a) native linux version...

well...

we'll see how well wine goes. am watching https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=16405 (and these threads) with eager anticipation.
i might do a robolinux install, just to give me a distro that has wine/virtual/windowsifications up the wazzoo ootb.

about two decades i've been waiting for this game. over half my life. i hope it's [working in some form] on linux SOON. (maybe... official native version a week after mac version ...sounds nice enough ~(wishful dreaming)~)

... or maybe i'll wait until i can land on a planet (manually!)... otherwise it's just not real to me, just not elite yet.

*ahem,* incase it was somehow missed in my rambling:

+1 linux version, please.


*rocks back n forth repeating, a linux version of elite dangerous will come... a linux version will come... a linux version will come...*

 

[Tuzmaal]

Every gaming forum you find a thread from Linux geeks asking for supporting their ( only for servers useful ) plattform. I know MS is awful but if you wanna play games on a PC their is no way around it, get used to it.

 

[CmdrJacks]

The vast majority of software available for Linux is in your distro's app repo, regardless of what distro you land on. This includes the GNOME's GUI, KDE's GUI, XFCE, LXDE, Enlightenment, and any of the other lesser known GUIs for Linux, so you have a lot to choose from. They're also entirely interoperable. I highly recomend installing all of them (drive space is cheap), and just futzing around with them til you find one you like. (people will call me crazy to suggest this, but they should try it too.)

This is a good way to get stuck with a hard to fix user account. By all means do this... but create a new user to test each one . Some configuration files are shared between some DEs and can lead to hard to diagnose problems down the road (e.g XFCE and LXDE don't play nice and can cause problems with GNOME). Some people swear by very basic tiling window managers which can be custom built up to be very pretty and incredibly efficient in use. Personally I like the QT apps and KDE.

For what it's worth, I use Arch because it uses the latest and greatest and tries hard not to patch upstream with the convenience of being a binary distribution. It isn't recommended for someone who doesn't know their way a bit around linux to begin with.

 

[WaylanderPK]

Linux is cool.

Every gaming forum you find a thread from Linux geeks asking for supporting their ( only for servers useful ) plattform. I know MS is awful but if you wanna play games on a PC their is no way around it, get used to it.

Linux is fully functional desktop, useful and superior in many ways to Windows. I used Windows for years until I finally went full penguin 8 years ago. Other than a few choice games I don't really feel the loss. Asking for a Linux client is well within our rights, so I don't see why you would bother coming into a thread on Linux to leave this message.

FD would be better served in figuring out the cost to bring it to Linux and running a kickstarter, people will either put up or shut up and it would have little impact on the current development. Personally I'd rather not get used to a world where my choice of OS dictates what games I can play, surely an OS agnostic development path should be preferable to hitching ones code to even the most used Operating System in the world. Its not like the days of assembler, where bare metal techniques where used to eek out extra cycles. Its all pretty much abstracted away in OpenGl/SDl or DirectX, or even further with Unity or Unreal 4 ect.

 

[wolfmoon]

I am a Linux user and run Windows just for Elite, but this kind of indignant "all is lost, I'll take my money elsewhere" tone is very annoying. You won't be "stuck" playing Star Citizen on Linux until at least 2017 so Frontier have quite a bit of time to catch up to your expectations. Do you seriously think this is a priority for them? Yes, yes we are all fans of Elite and Linux, but let's face it, Linux on Steam has a consistent 1.1% market share. It is not yet a financially viable platform, and I would much rather Frontier put ALL their time right now into making the game fun, glitch-free and financially successful than satisfying the expectations of a few dozen Linux nerds like us. Let's just all behave like adults shall we?

A question dear sir, how did you gather from my reply of a personal opinion nature that I did not behave as an adult?
I expressed my opinion as politely possible based on current knowledge.
I use Linux daily and I am glad of the movement of games for Linux.
I contributed to more than 100 kickstarter game projects that will release their games to Linux.
Indeed some of them merely hinted on the possibility of a Linux version and Elite was one of them.
I invested 30₤ into the project and at this point in time it seems to me as a waste of my money.
Now days I continue to invest in kickstarter games that 100% guarantee a Linux version of the game on day one.
As many Linux users I do hope that someday the game will be released natively on Linux.
Linux as a viable gaming platform is more now than ever was and it will continue to grow.
By the way my steam Library contains as of now 432 Linux games.

 

[Tuzmaal]

Linux is fully functional desktop, useful and superior in many ways to Windows. I used Windows for years until I finally went full penguin 8 years ago. Other than a few choice games I don't really feel the loss. Asking for a Linux client is well within our rights, so I don't see why you would bother coming into a thread on Linux to leave this

Face it, your fully functional Linux desktop needs tons of 3rd party programs to be as functional as a MS client in the gaming world. You Linux geeks are prolly less then 1% of the ED community.... why would FD spend any money on you from a business perspective ?

 

[Cmdr Moritz]

Face it, your fully functional Linux desktop needs tons of 3rd party programs to be as functional as a MS client in the gaming world. You Linux geeks are prolly less then 1% of the ED community.... why would FD spend any money on you from a business perspective ?

Because this is exactly where the revolution starts and the MS license market for desktops stop!

 

[PvtTUX]

Face it, your fully functional Linux desktop needs tons of 3rd party programs to be as functional as a MS client in the gaming world. You Linux geeks are prolly less then 1% of the ED community.... why would FD spend any money on you from a business perspective ?

Once the MAC version is done I suspect porting over to Linux wouldn't be so hard anyway ?

Time will tell

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Face it, your fully functional Linux desktop needs tons of 3rd party programs to be as functional as a MS client in the gaming world.

Many distros these days come with the proprietary drivers already there and many will detect and offer to install the propriatary driver for you during install. Then you are at your desktop and can get installing games. eg: Install Steam, download, ready to go.

Certainly no more hassle than under windows... hell, in many ways less.

What is lacking is the wide range of games that are available, but that is something that hopefully will change with time.

 

[noreply]

Face it, your fully functional Linux desktop needs tons of 3rd party programs to be as functional as a MS client in the gaming world. You Linux geeks are prolly less then 1% of the ED community.... why would FD spend any money on you from a business perspective ?

The proportion of desktops where Linux is primarily used is not really known, but various estimates put that number between 2 and 5% in the general population. Equivalently, the proportion of OSX desktops is about 2.5%, so there is probably at least 1 Linux desktop user for every Mac user.

However, given that the sample of people who are interested in Elite seems quite skewed to the sciences/engineering/maths crowd, I would hazard a guess that a good proportion of this forum use Linux on the desktop, maybe as many as 7-10%.

If we have a Mac version planned, it would seem sensible that we should get a Linux version too. There are at least as many users. And if the Humble Bundle is anything to go by, it is the Linux users that commit the most amount of money.

 

[amigacooke]

The proportion of desktops where Linux is primarily used is not really known, but various estimates put that number between 2 and 5% in the general population. Equivalently, the proportion of OSX desktops is about 2.5%, so there is probably at least 1 Linux desktop user for every Mac user.

However, given that the sample of people who are interested in Elite seems quite skewed to the sciences/engineering/maths crowd, I would hazard a guess that a good proportion of this forum use Linux on the desktop, maybe as many as 7-10%.

If we have a Mac version planned, it would seem sensible that we should get a Linux version too. There are at least as many users. And if the Humble Bundle is anything to go by, it is the Linux users that commit the most amount of money.

I would imagine that all the figures are skewed by desktops that are exclusively used for work.

 

[noreply]

I would imagine that all the figures are skewed by desktops that are exclusively used for work.

This is an interesting idea, but actually I'm not sure it is true.

Example 1: I am a software developer and am required to develop on Windows machines at work, yet I choose to use Linux on my home machines.

Example 2: Have you been to a software development conference any time in the last 2 years? You cannot move for matt aluminium macbooks. It is like every web developer has a macbook pro/air that they were given for work.

I realise that these two little anecdotes of mine don't really represent scientific data at all, but I think what I'm getting at is that if you were to divide the various operating system flavours by work/home use in a 1:1 ratio (not realistic, I also agree), you'd probably find that more work computers run Windows than home computers, and more home computers run OSX or Linux than work computers.

My point is that although the absolute number of home machines that run Windows is huge compared to anything else, there are probably at least as many Linux home users as Mac users.

Disclaimer: this is all speculation based on anecdotal evidence, as we don't have the real numbers.

 

[RedMcG]

+1 to Linux version. Can't see it being a commercial priority - but I do heart Linux.

For those not in the know - Linux has come a long way in the gaming scene recently thanks largely to SteamOS.

I have about 120 titles in my Steam account and about 40 odd run on Linux. Some big titles too - for example Civ 5, XCOM Enemy Unknown and the whole Valve catalog.

All of them run just as well in Linux as Windows.

 

[DrSpin]

This is an interesting idea, but actually I'm not sure it is true.
Example 2: Have you been to a software development conference any time in the last 2 years? You cannot move for matt aluminium macbooks. It is like every web developer has a macbook pro/air that they were given for work.

I work at CERN, and pretty much every meeting I'm in is 90% macs. Not sure I agree with your conclusions, but just thought it was interesting that so many of us physicists are on OS X. In my experiment at least, we typically run our analysis on Linux machines though, so our SW has to work on Linux first, OS X second (and Windows a distant third).

 

[noreply]

I work at CERN, and pretty much every meeting I'm in is 90% macs. Not sure I agree with your conclusions, but just thought it was interesting that so many of us physicists are on OS X. In my experiment at least, we typically run our analysis on Linux machines though, so our SW has to work on Linux first, OS X second (and Windows a distant third).

It is a bit off-topic, but how do you run your analysis, in Python?

My intuition for the growth of the Mac as a developer tool is that modern development has (generally speaking) moved away from low-level compiled languages (C, C++ etc.) more towards compiled VM-based (Java, .NET etc.) and pure dynamic languages (Ruby, Python, node.js etc.)

With respect, your work environment sounds a bit unusual if fairly awesome! For the most part and in my experience, most SMEs and a lot of big enterprises (at least in the UK) are still stuck in the 'Use Windows for everything' mentality - even banks!

 

[amigacooke]

This is an interesting idea, but actually I'm not sure it is true.

Example 1: I am a software developer and am required to develop on Windows machines at work, yet I choose to use Linux on my home machines.

Example 2: Have you been to a software development conference any time in the last 2 years? You cannot move for matt aluminium macbooks. It is like every web developer has a macbook pro/air that they were given for work.

I realise that these two little anecdotes of mine don't really represent scientific data at all, but I think what I'm getting at is that if you were to divide the various operating system flavours by work/home use in a 1:1 ratio (not realistic, I also agree), you'd probably find that more work computers run Windows than home computers, and more home computers run OSX or Linux than work computers.

My point is that although the absolute number of home machines that run Windows is huge compared to anything else, there are probably at least as many Linux home users as Mac users.

Disclaimer: this is all speculation based on anecdotal evidence, as we don't have the real numbers.

I work in a government building which has large numbers of Windows machines, none of which have any games on them, nor would expect to have games on them. I merely make the point that out of the vast numbers of corporate machines running Windows, I'd expect games to be very unwelcome on the vast majority.

 

[Flying Penguin]

This is an interesting idea, but actually I'm not sure it is true.

Example 1: I am a software developer and am required to develop on Windows machines at work, yet I choose to use Linux on my home machines.

Example 2: Have you been to a software development conference any time in the last 2 years? You cannot move for matt aluminium macbooks. It is like every web developer has a macbook pro/air that they were given for work.

I realise that these two little anecdotes of mine don't really represent scientific data at all, but I think what I'm getting at is that if you were to divide the various operating system flavours by work/home use in a 1:1 ratio (not realistic, I also agree), you'd probably find that more work computers run Windows than home computers, and more home computers run OSX or Linux than work computers.

My point is that although the absolute number of home machines that run Windows is huge compared to anything else, there are probably at least as many Linux home users as Mac users.

Disclaimer: this is all speculation based on anecdotal evidence, as we don't have the real numbers.

Well, I'm an IT/Info Sec consultant by trade (don't laugh), I've spent a lot of time trapesing round a lot of BIIIIIIG organisations (mostly banks/oil companies/utilities) and these companies are huge consumers of desktop pcs by the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. And almost without exception they have been Microsoft shops in non-specialist desktop roles (i.e. anything that isn't marketing/design, Macs, or highly technical/high end analytics, Linix and esoterics). Whilst there are some smaller organisations (and possibly the odd big one, especially media organisations) which are not Windows shops, I find it very hard to believe that they cancel out the sheer scale of the Windows estates in larger non-media companies.

Assuming the figures mentioned earlier take desktop PCs as a whole, if there is any skewing, it is vastly under representing the presence of Macs at home. As for Linux, I would suggest that the numbers are less skewed against home ownership, as most technology organisations/departments have some level of Linux presence, so the same argument as for Windows will apply, albeit to a lesser extent.

To take another (admittedly anecdotal, but typical for the organisations I've seen) example:
Our organisation: ~12,000 people in the UK (200,000 worldwide), all of those having at least one Windows machine. Our IT dept has a suite of Linux desktops, a good chunk, but minimal in comparison to the Windows estate. There are a few marketing types with a Mac, but in our head office (nominal home for 7,000 of the UK based people including all our UK marketing people) I've seen a small handful of Macs, less than a dozen, and we don't give out MacBooks.

Net result, the Linux desktop install base is much higher than Mac in this business context, but I don't know a single person with a Linux home PC, whereas I can look round right now and point out several Mac users within metres of where I'm sitting.

TLR; Without an accurate work/home split, the figures are near worthless for estimating the size of the Linux market for ED, so arguing 1 Linux user per Mac user is tenuous at best.

 

[Brianetta]

Elite was ported to at least 13 platforms. It's a shame Frontier are treating two platforms as ambitious, and three as a distinct maybe not.

 

[Rurod]

Would loooove to have this on Linux,

 

[Demonic Squid]

Well, I'm an IT/Info Sec consultant by trade (don't laugh), I've spent a lot of time trapesing round a lot of BIIIIIIG organisations (mostly banks/oil companies/utilities) and these companies are huge consumers of desktop pcs by the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. And almost without exception they have been Microsoft shops in non-specialist desktop roles (i.e. anything that isn't marketing/design, Macs, or highly technical/high end analytics, Linix and esoterics). Whilst there are some smaller organisations (and possibly the odd big one, especially media organisations) which are not Windows shops, I find it very hard to believe that they cancel out the sheer scale of the Windows estates in larger non-media companies.

Assuming the figures mentioned earlier take desktop PCs as a whole, if there is any skewing, it is vastly under representing the presence of Macs at home. As for Linux, I would suggest that the numbers are less skewed against home ownership, as most technology organisations/departments have some level of Linux presence, so the same argument as for Windows will apply, albeit to a lesser extent.

To take another (admittedly anecdotal, but typical for the organisations I've seen) example:
Our organisation: ~12,000 people in the UK (200,000 worldwide), all of those having at least one Windows machine. Our IT dept has a suite of Linux desktops, a good chunk, but minimal in comparison to the Windows estate. There are a few marketing types with a Mac, but in our head office (nominal home for 7,000 of the UK based people including all our UK marketing people) I've seen a small handful of Macs, less than a dozen, and we don't give out MacBooks.

Net result, the Linux desktop install base is much higher than Mac in this business context, but I don't know a single person with a Linux home PC, whereas I can look round right now and point out several Mac users within metres of where I'm sitting.

TLR; Without an accurate work/home split, the figures are near worthless for estimating the size of the Linux market for ED, so arguing 1 Linux user per Mac user is tenuous at best.

Totally anecdotal, and I work in media these days as well (so huge mac bias), but I don't know anyone who actually uses a Windows PC at home. At work, mixed with macs, but at home, no. Everyone has macbooks or imacs. Of those that play games, they have consoles (xbox or ps3/4), or play games on their macs (like me!)...

I have an arch linux install in a virtual machine for messing around with python and some other code that is far easier to access and experiment with on linux. I installed windows on bootcamp for the sole reason of playing Elite Dangerous... Would love to see either platform supported in the future, and I backed given the OSX stretch goal...