Linux

As someone who tends to hit my data cap on a regular basis, here are a few pointers:

Be patient!
After the last few patches the client is downloading a lot more information before being ready.
For instance the patch today was roughly 50 megs, there were another 20megs of bulk data and then another 20 megs which includes the market averages which are now downloaded on a daily basis.

It is a very good idea to use the log file, it gives some idea of what is happening.
Also if you can run a traffic monitor, you can see whether you are hung (nothing happening) or waiting on large file(s) - which usually shows up as connection(s) to cloudfront or the like.
Eve is being optimized for faster connections, so frequently it ends up opening several parallel downloads, which end up choking a slow connection and resulting in a lot of aborts, and the whole process takes even longer.
Use the download everything option if you can, but NOT when you want to play. Set the launcher to download everything before bedtime, then turn it off (and restart launcher) when you want to play. You will end up getting at least another few hundred megs of files each time on a throttled connection.
There have been a lot of texture updates lately so its important to keep as up to date as possible to avoid those hangs when you do encounter something recently redecorated and you urgently need to pew it.

Game play itself is still light on resources, and it is still quite possible to play (even pew with fleet coms) if your cache is sufficiently up to date.