EVE General Discussion

So I wanted to get back into the game after a very long absence but to my dismay this old computer running Windows XP is no longer able to be my trustworthy Space Cabin. After reading a bit I saw some use linux and some use windows. ANd considering I need to change to be able to play I was wondering what does the playerbase actually use and what has more support from CCP. And out of those.. wich is the cheapest!

Ive always been on a budget and this time its no different. If I can avoid a hefty bill by using an alternative that might require a bit more of time.. I dont mind putting in the extra effort.

Any recommendations? Is there a playerbase statistic on what OS are used? I read 3.2% was of Windows XP.. is there a chart somewhere that shows the different OS used to play EVE?

Happy Hunting!
ZZ

Just to add that nobody should be running Windows XP anymore. It's past the end-of-life date for support and you are at significant risk on the Internet while running it.

Which, of course, is why the US government use it in so many places.

Are you out of your mind?! You can't just ask a question like that. It could well start a war! ;)

Personally, I use Gentoo. It's a rolling release, source based distribution, and it comes with next to nothing out of the box. Meaning that I never have to migrate to the next release version and can freely pick and customise which packages get installed, allowing it to perform great, even on older hardware. The portage tree does not always contain the latest and greatest versions of a package, but that does in turn mean that (unless I pull in unstable packages on purpose, which I do, because I'm a rebel! ;) ) the system is rock stable. The downside is, that it's a bit complicated, and installing packages takes a long time, because they are compiled from source code.

Then there's Arch, another distribution I like a lot. Like Gentoo it's rolling release, and like Gentoo it's very barebones out of the box. But this one is binary based, so you won't need to compile the packages you install. It's easier to use than Gentoo, very well documented (the Arch wiki is pretty much the best one around) and still quite lightweight and flexible. Arch tends to be "bleeding edge" and not exactly the most stable among Linux Distributions.

Both Arch and Gentoo have spawned other distros that aim to make installation and maintenance a bit easier and less "hacky", such as Chakra or Sabayon, but I'm not a big fan of those, personally.

If you don't want to spend too much time learning how to get things to work, there are easy to use distributions like Linux Mint or Xubuntu around. Both are about the same when it comes to package management, and they can even use the same repositories, because they are both based on Ubuntu. Ubuntu itself I would not necessarily recommend because of the bloat that tends to come with it out of the box. You can get rid of it and install a lighter desktop, if you like, but there's no real benefit to installing Ubuntu and then installing say XFCE on it over using Xubuntu right from the get-go.

I would say that Ubuntu-flavours and -derivates, as well as Arch and Gentoo are the most commonly used distros among the Eve community, at least judging by what's being posted in the Linux forum section. That doesn't mean they are the only viable ones, though.

Really, in the end it doesn't matter. You can do about anything you can do with a Linux OS with all the major distributions. The main differences are which package manager they use, which packages are available from their repositories by default and what gets installed out of the box besides the Linux kernel. Yes, there may be performance differences, but with a bit of tinkering, you can usually get all the distributions to perform very similarly.

I'd say try some, and use whichever one you like best. They all come free of charge, so if you can spend a bit of time to try a few, I recommend doing so.

If you run into any trouble, you can most likely find a solution on the web. If not, just ask on the forums of whichever distro you chose. If you have questions specifically related to Eve on Linux, head over to the Linux section and we'll probably be able to figure something out.

Maybe you really should stay off of operating systems that charge if you think that wasn't relevant or helpful. Then you won't have to worry about running old out of date stuff that gets you pwned every five minutes.

As for a gaming OS, look at this order:

Windows > OSX > Linux

Windows will always be the gaming OS unless somebody rewrites Linux / OSX. Also keep in mind, some hardware manufacturers propriortize their drivers, which means Linux usually gets the shaft and the free lance coders get the dirty work of making the hardware work. Because of the issues with drivers, you're going to have to build your machine around Linux. This could mean possibly having to use hardware that's deprecated. Keep in mind, if you can find a pirated copy of Windows 10, MS will not make you pay for it. Certain features will be disabled, but it won't break the OS or keep you from using it. Actually, I think you can download the whole Win10 OS from MS for free. Windows 10 Download

Just some thoughts, OP.

EDIT: Don't rule out making a Hackintosh! I made one about a year or so ago. It was quite the thrilling challenge trying to find this and that to get it working right (well mostly). If you can get that working, you'll be on a solid OS that's a bit better at gaming than a Linux distro. Although, you will find that OSX and Linux have more in common than you might think.

I don't mean to offend, but most of this is bogus. Indeed, Windows is currently the most widely used gaming OS, but in order for that to change neither OSX nor Linux would need to be "rewritten". Both are perfectly capable of running games. The games that are available for them for instance through Steam do not perform any worse than their Windows versions.

The thing is that Windows has been the most widespread home computer OS by far (talking 90% market share for the most part) for 20 years at least. Mac OS has been marketed as a serious, "professional" OS in the 90es, and only started becoming a "lifestyle choice" fairly recently. GNU/Linux has only reached a state where it could be used reasonably well as a home desktop OS in recent years. So there simply was not exactly a huge demand for games and APIs on those two up until now and there was no economic incentive to develop games for them. But that's changing.

On top of that, Microsoft has a couple of tools that make it easy (easier) to develop games, such as MSVC, .NET and DirectX. Eve for instance is using or has used all of them at some point, courtesy of being a game made in 2003. Were CCP developing Eve right now, things would probably be different. These tools do however bind developers to the platform, as MS will be damned if they release DirectX for Linux and OSX, and once a company has developed a game engine for DirectX, they's probably not want to rewrite it for OpenGL or Vulkan until it's outlived its usefulness anyway.

So, not Linux or OSX would need to be rewritten, but game developers would need to start developing games that work with them. And in case you haven't noticed - this is happening. Case in Point: Deus Ex, Total War, Civilization, XCOM, every Paradox game,...

Steam is available on both, and the selection of games on Steam for non-windows platforms isn't all that terrible at all anymore. The popularity of smartphones, both iOS and Android has created a demand for new APIs that are not DirectX and engines that work on all sorts of platforms, because Microsoft has so far failed to get a foothold in that market. For the first time in years, DirectX has a worthy competitor with Vulkan. Unity, Unreal Engine and Cryengine support OSX and Linux, Lord GabeN is pushing heavily towards other platforms, and especially linux based ones. It will certainly take a few years yet, but Microsoft is losing its grip.

And by far most games that have been released lately on OSX are available on Linux too and vice versa, simply because there's no good reason anymore for the developers to limit themselves to either one. When it comes to Windows-exclusive games, OSX and Linux perform very similarly as well - either a game works with wine, or it doesn't.

Installing a Hackintosh on any old PC you have lying around will probably cause a lot of headache. If you want to do it right, you'd have to buy at least a few new components known to work with Hackintosh in most cases. So, there's no reason to try and build a Hackintosh machine if you just want to game. If you like OSX a lot, or if you just want a challenge, sure - go for it. If you have a Mac, and don't want to install Windows - then yes, by all means use OSX. But if you have a PC and no money for a Windows license, just grab a Linux distro.

Concerning the driver issue - Linux has drivers for about everything built into the kernel. I have yet to encounter a machine where recent versions of major distributions do not have working drivers for most things out of the box. Issues I do encounter are Bluetooth and Wireless LAN, but it's usually just a matter of downloading a proprietary firmware blob for them, because hardware manufacturers do provide those for the most part, believe it or not. The same goes for graphics cards: Both nVidia and AMD provide proprietary Linux drivers for their Cards, and they do both work well. nVidia is a bit stingy when it comes to supporting open source projects, but AMD is all for it. That's why the open source AMD drivers (radeonsi, amdgpu) are excellent, whereas the open source nVidia drivers (nouveau) aren't quite there yet. However, drivers exist, be they proprietary or open, and they do work, and there are options that work very well for both red and green. When was the last time you tried using Linux if you still think missing driver support is a thing?

Unless you are already familiar with Linux, you also need to consider whether it would be 'worth it' for you to go down that route. From general point of view, Linux can be great and there are many things you can do on it, and if you do like looking into things & fiddling & learning how to customise things your way, the whole experience could be worthwhile.

But if you are not familiar with Linux already, and if you do not find learning such things enjoyable, is it really worth the time? There's great community out there and people work free to contribute to the community, and a lot of free literature available if you care to look in to them. But if reading such things and making effort to understand them and all that gives you headache, Windows may actually be a cheaper option in terms of time/effort spent on setting things up.

Don't get me wrong. I do enjoy looking into things and when you can get something working which you didn't know how to make work before it can be a very rewarding experience on its own, but it's only if you are into that sort of things. This may be a simple comparison, but hours spent on getting something to work on a non-officially supported platform can be hours spent doing very basic part time work and paying for a natively supported OS.

Windows is by no means perfect and there are many things people can be unhappy about, but it's very easy/cheap option actually for those who don't want to spend time fiddling (but then again, when something is supposed to work but doesn't work as it's supposed to on Windows, and you need to get it to work, THAT can be really frustrating and a big waste of time, and in many cases you won't even know why it's not working, and often you get no meaningful error messages offering insight into why it's not working, etc).

hi, I don't mean to derail the thread but I'm actually quite curious about this point. Because I do quite a bit of video editing (as hobby) and in general, AMD cards and Open CL standards are much better supported in free/cheaper s/w options, to the extent on some software and plug-ins, cheaper/older AMD cards actually outperform newer/more expensive NVIDIA cards (because not all of the CUDA available is utilized).

As a real life example, Sony Vegas, when using Open CL for GPU acceleration, it makes use of all available resources from AMD cards, but for NVIDIA cards, even if your new NVIDIA cards have 2000+ CUDA cores, Vegas will only use up to 500 or so CUDA cores, which means the rest of the CUDA cores on newer cards are not being used. :p (so you get some ridiculous examples where an AMD card for gaming out performs new line ups of NVIDIA Quattro card on Vegas)

For more high-end s/w options, such as those from Adobe line up, they have very good support for CUDA from what I've seen, e.g., After Effect work nicely with NVIDIA card.

I wonder what is the digital video editing in Linux like? Because part of the reason why I'm staying with AMD on my home PC is because it works well enough for both moderate gaming & video editing using Open CL. BUT obviously the new Nvidia cards (1080) are very very tempting. So if there was a good Linux solution that works well with Nvidia cards it would be trivial/easy to run my home PC using 1080 for gaming on windows while doing video editing stuff on Linux dual boot (if they make good use of the new NVIDIA cards on that platform).

Any thoughts or pointers on this? Thanks

EDIT; Just to add, while I said I do video editing as 'hobby', I do experiment with some crazy stuff to the extent that GPU hardware support does matter, both for rendering and video previews while editing. The longest render job on my 'hobby' project took like 48 hours or something WITH GPU acceleration support using Open CL. If I used Nvidia card for that it would have taken at least double that time , based on my render time comparisons using other video tests)

No. It's really not.

The accessibility of game development has very little to do with the operating system itself. Every OS offers some access to APIs that manipulate the graphics chipset and render things on the screen. The reason Windows has (had. it's slipping there just as it is everywhere else.) the lion's share of the gaming market is solely because of the directX set of APIs. These are completely and totally unavailable to *nix based OSs. Apple will not magically be able to run PC games without emulation by "investing" some amount of money. There's a fundamental difference between the way a Windows machine accesses hardware and the way a unix or linux machine does.

Apple has invested heavily in games-oriented APIs, and that is bearing fruit for people who want to write custom code for the platform.

Software developers like to use things they are familiar with, and Windows has about a 10 year advantage in terms of how long its been exposing mostly the same set of instructions for manipulating the graphics systems. Windows also has the very unenviable position of making damn sure that nothing ever breaks, which is why it has been able to maintain such a good position in the gaming world.

The bottom line about your view of the technology world is that it's really really wrong.

Apple, Linux flavors, and Windows all offer similarly accessible APIs for game developers. It's the game devs who make choices about which platforms to support. They mostly have chosen Windows in the past because that's what they know, and because that's where the most money could be made. They are choosing linux and Apple platforms more and more now because there is a more sustainable market there now than there was before.

It has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the OS was "designed to make games" or anything else as idiotic as that.