Elite:Dangerous for Linux?

Micha

Micha
Heh, also a Debianite - not sure how/why I got onto it but been running it for over 15 years on all my servers, desktops, and laptops. Occasionally dabbled in other distros. Of the "big ones", early Ubuntu was actually pretty good, and drove the development of some much-needed end-user usability into the mix; Suse was one of the first to "plug-and-play" on a laptop in the early noughties, Redhat I've never really liked for some reason. Ran Linux Mint for a while, but eventually decided to just run plain Debian again.

It "just works". :)

From a headless server install, to a minimalist old-laptop install, to a full-monty desktop install it handles it all.
The package management is superb, the maintainability and stability second-to-none. I had a server running for over 7 years with no reinstalls, just upgrades between versions and even surviving hardware changes - the final clincher was wanting to move to 64-bit. I did try to upgrade but in the end it was easier, and well past-time, for a reinstall. All the data and most of the config carried over though..
 

BurntJello

BurntJello
znôrt said:
just to be clear, disparaging has never been the intention. not even remotely. just different perspectives.

try looking at it this way: by using wine you are promoting windows exactly as much as i do by using windows. the fact that you didn't buy a windows license isn't even anecdotal for frontier or any 3rd party developer. as newt says, it's invisible, and as micha says, it's just about economics. in our example, the only way (for customers) to promote an ed linux port is refusing to buy an ed windows version. wine just promotes wine, and while it makes more 'linux users' possible, it also perpetuates more 'windows software' being thrown at the world. it doesn't address the question of openess or compatibility, it short circuit's it.

and i can't say that's a bad thing either. it's just ... choice.
Click to expand...
I view it a bit differently.

I think that the more people that are using linux, the more likely future software will have native linux versions. Recent advancements with dxvk/wine/proton will enable more people to move to linux. As the linux population grows, developers will start to take it more seriously.

I think the best way to promote ED-linux is for those people that bought ED after it was confirmed to run through WINE on linux, to tell FDev that they only bought it because of that. Silent not-sales won't change anything.
 

znôrt

znôrt
BurntJello said:
I think that the more people that are using linux, the more likely future software will have native linux versions. Recent advancements with dxvk/wine/proton will enable more people to move to linux. As the linux population grows, developers will start to take it more seriously.
Click to expand...

yeah, well, that's exactly the dilemma we were discussing. the counterargument is that developers would say: "okay, you run linux and you can get along with wine, so why should i invest in supporting native if you are going to buy my windows version anyway?".

BurntJello said:
I think the best way to promote ED-linux is for those people that bought ED after it was confirmed to run through WINE on linux, to tell FDev that they only bought it because of that. Silent not-sales won't change anything.
Click to expand...

this has also been addressed. even if frontier had announced official support for wine (dunno, have they?), they did announce support for mac and dropped it as soon as it became a hairy affair. they just pointed to ... bootcamp.
 

VictorT

VictorT
I still think Frontier knew what they were getting into when they announced a Mac port. This was before Horizons. You can see in this very thread way back then that I predicted/explained it would be a better idea to port to Linux instead because OpenGL support (at the time, and still today) was better on Linux than the mac. I went on to predict they'd be underwhelmed with their Mac port, and that would hurt the chances of a native Linux port.

Had Frontier ported to Linux instead of Mac back then, the eventual Mac version would have been easier to approach, and wouldn't have soured them on ports to other PC platforms besides Windows. No I'm not sure how it would have been easier, Mac still doesn't support OpenGL4.5, but maybe MoltenVK would have been a more approachable stack, too.

oh well. To the point that FD doesn't care and would just us lean on WINE or Bootcamp.. There'll always be developer houses like that, that would just have us eat cak^H^H^H^H^H^H^Huse WINE. And for them, sure, It's an option.. but in a large number of other developer houses, there are many Linux lovers who would just as soon have their games run on Linux as well. I believe it's a bit of a mixed bag.. For now I no longer have complaints, because I can play Elite, and for me, that's more important (Being that they've always been my favorite games) that I can play it at all.

I hold out hope for a native Linux version of Elite one day.. but not so sad and desperately anymore. ^_^
 

Maolagin

M
Micha said:
From a headless server install, to a minimalist old-laptop install, to a full-monty desktop install it handles it all.
The package management is superb, the maintainability and stability second-to-none. I had a server running for over 7 years with no reinstalls, just upgrades between versions and even surviving hardware changes - the final clincher was wanting to move to 64-bit.
Click to expand...
Hear hear! My oldest is a Debian server that has been running and upgraded in-place since 2001. Zero original components remaining on that one - a regular Ship of Theseus it is!
 

Genar-Hofoen

Genar-Hofoen
Micha said:
Heh, also a Debianite - not sure how/why I got onto it but been running it for over 15 years on all my servers, desktops, and laptops. Occasionally dabbled in other distros. Of the "big ones", early Ubuntu was actually pretty good, and drove the development of some much-needed end-user usability into the mix; Suse was one of the first to "plug-and-play" on a laptop in the early noughties, Redhat I've never really liked for some reason. Ran Linux Mint for a while, but eventually decided to just run plain Debian again.

It "just works". :)

From a headless server install, to a minimalist old-laptop install, to a full-monty desktop install it handles it all.
The package management is superb, the maintainability and stability second-to-none. I had a server running for over 7 years with no reinstalls, just upgrades between versions and even surviving hardware changes - the final clincher was wanting to move to 64-bit. I did try to upgrade but in the end it was easier, and well past-time, for a reinstall. All the data and most of the config carried over though..
Click to expand...

I used Debian for 15+ years too and it is indeed good.

However, once WINE started getting to the stage where it could run ED, I began to encounter annoyances, the biggest one being not being able to have all the 32 and 64 bit development libraries installed at the same time, when compiling WINE. I had to install a certain collection of 32 bit dev packages, compile the 32 bit component of WINE, then uninstall those, install their 64 bit equivalents, then compile the 64 bit component of WINE. The wine-staging packages at that point weren't keeping up with the most recent version(s) of WINE.

It was at that point I switched to Arch, which more or less has quite speedy updates to wine-staging.

There have been other annoyances I've encountered with Debian in the past, which I had tolerated and dealt with. But the WINE situation described above was the clincher.

IMO Debian is superb for servers, but for desktops and in particular for desktop usage like for example playing games, some other distribution is probably more suitable if you don't wish to be spending certain amounts of time overcoming problems and barriers encountered running Debian on the desktop.
 

cpw

C
Fellow debianite checking in! I've been using E:D on my Debian Sid box since we first figured out how to get it working last year. I bought and dual booted for a bit before that, but left the game behind because dual booting was a pain and Linux is my preferred choice.

I'm back again at it, with a new box - 3900x and RTX2080 enjoying silky smooth 60fps on ultra settings, including parallel streaming and video encoding. Debian is just the best. FYI: I migrated over to using steam+proton for running E:D - it's awesome and dead easy to setup. Just install protontricks and run a single command to get everything 100% working.
 
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yves21haut

Y
cpw said:
Fellow debianite checking in! I've been using E:D on my Debian Sid box since we first figured out how to get it working last year. I bought and dual booted for a bit before that, but left the game behind because dual booting was a pain and Linux is my preferred choice.

I'm back again at it, with a new box - 3900x and RTX2080 enjoying silky smooth 60fps on ultra settings, including parallel streaming and video encoding. Debian is just the best. FYI: I migrated over to using steam+proton for running E:D - it's awesome and dead easy to setup. Just install protontricks and run a single command to get everything 100% working.
Click to expand...
Hello, can you say me the command line? Thank you very much
 

EUS

EUS
Debian has been my server choice since '03, and my and my family's daily desktop since Etch.
Yes, stable means stability, which is great if you don't need the newest stuff.
However, deb9 has been great for nvidia drivers, and out of the box steam support/gaming.
I have installed wine form testing, and winetricks from the source, but have no idea howto utilze them WRT using steam/proton.
So I'm quite happy running most of my games natively, or with proton.
I haven't booted into win7 in a long time.
Unfortunately, I'm getting the itch to fire up my modded skyrim, which means win7 again.
If they were willing, FD could quite easily take what they've done for mac, and release a native linux port.
 

cpw

C
EUS said:
Debian has been my server choice since '03, and my and my family's daily desktop since Etch.
Yes, stable means stability, which is great if you don't need the newest stuff.
However, deb9 has been great for nvidia drivers, and out of the box steam support/gaming.
I have installed wine form testing, and winetricks from the source, but have no idea howto utilze them WRT using steam/proton.
So I'm quite happy running most of my games natively, or with proton.
I haven't booted into win7 in a long time.
Unfortunately, I'm getting the itch to fire up my modded skyrim, which means win7 again.
If they were willing, FD could quite easily take what they've done for mac, and release a native linux port.
Click to expand...

If you can install steam (you can, you're on debian 9, it's part of the repo), then you can install and RUN! E: D directly. Go check the discussion over here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...experimental-not-officially-supported.366894/
 

cpw

C
EUS said:
I've been following that thread since forever.
I've just been waiting for the proton release that would work for ED without the extra steps.
Yes, steam, and many games are working for me.
Click to expand...
Yeah, the bit that's missing is some .NET functions to make the launcher work properly. The actual game would run fine without any action. The launcher is using some weird corners of .NET.
 
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