Since a while ago, Eve Online started to work again on Steam on my Arch Linux system. It’s great as no troubleshooting or tuning is required. I wondered if I can skip Steam and install Eve Online directly, the reason is that Steam must have some impact on games like the overlays, etc., because I have an old but yet power GPU but Eve on Steam struggles from time to time even on medium graphics settings.

I found this wiki page quite inspiring in regard to Eve on Linux, however I didn’t manage to get it to work following the steps there. Last time I installed World of Warcraft using Bottles successfully so I’d like to try it with Bottles again.

The Bottles app can be installed in the Software manager:

Once Bottles is running, the first thing is to install the latest GE Proton runner, at the moment it’s 10-17. To download the runner, press “Ctrl + ," hotkey or click on the menu icon at top right –> Preference, then on the Runners tab click the download icon next to ge-proton10-17. This will take a few minutes depending on download speed.

Next step is to create a fresh bottle for Eve. Click the + sign, put in the Name, select Custom type, and set Runner to the ge-proton just downloaded. And then hit the Create button. This again will take a few minutes.

Once the bottle is ready, there are some tweaks to get the game working. In the settings, enable DXVK which is the most important switch to have a smooth DirectX 11 experience on Linux. I heard that DX12 is troublesome so there’s no need to enable VKD3D.

If you can’t wait and run the installer now you will get hit by the mscoree.dll issue. To fix this I figured out that there are 2 steps:

1, uninstall the wine-mono package that got installed by default. This can be done using the legacy wine uninstaller tool. Once the uninstaller pops up, select wine-mono and remove it.

2, Override and use the native mscoree.dll. This is done in Settings –> Compatibility –> DLL Overrides.

The next step a few things in the dependency section must get installed:

• dotnet481
• vcredist2022
• allfonts

These can be installed in the Dependencies screen. I don’t recall the order which I installed the 3 but I doubt that would matter.

The next error to fix is the missing libvkd3d-1.dll and libvkd3d-shader-1.dll files. They exist already but from the error logs it’s clear that they need to be in the system directory. I ran the following command to copy the files

# by default Bottles stuff is here
cd ~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles

# copy the files, assuming the bottle is called EVE
# 32-bit first
cp ./data/bottles/runners/ge-proton10-17/files/share/default_pfx/drive_c/windows/system32/libvkd3d*.dll data/bottles/bottles/EVE/drive_c/windows/system32/
# 64-bit
cp ./data/bottles/runners/ge-proton10-17/files/share/default_pfx/drive_c/windows/syswow64/libvkd3d*.dll data/bottles/bottles/EVE/drive_c/windows/syswow64/

Now the installer should work! Use the Add Shortcuts button to select the installer downloaded from CCP.

Once the installer finished, add the launcher in the same way. The launcher should be at this location by default.

~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/EVE/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/eve-online

Also remember to set Eve to Direct X 11 mode in the launcher. That’s it! Fly safe! o7