Finally a way to get Elite Dangerous working on Linux
I recently got one of my favorite games working on Pop!_os and that game is Elite Dangerous! For clarity I did not invent the wheel here, I followed a very clear guide that can be found on GitHub here.
You will need to have Wine, Winetricks, you will also need to install dotnet40 and proton 4.2 or later. Some people are reporting that 4.2 provides a better experience than the later versions but that has not been my experience.
Steps to take to get Elite Dangerous working on Linux
Note: Make sure your Wine and Winetricks is up to to date. Assuming you have Wine, Winetricks and proton installed already the next step would be to install dotnet40. This is a bit tricky as you need to uninstall Wine-mono first. I did so by entering this wine64 uninstaller in the terminal. Once that opens you can highlight Wine-mono and uninstall it. Next up you can go ahead and install dotnet40 by entering this
rm -rf $WINEPREFIX
winetricks -q dotnet40 win7in the terminal. Note that the errors that come up when you first launch Elite Dangerous can safely be ignored.
I got Elite Dangerous up and running on Pop!_os. If you haven’t tried Pop!_os yet its a great distro from Sytem76 that is worth a look.
The Wiki on GitHub also has instructions for a manual install of dotnet40. It also has some trouble shooting steps if you are having issues getting Elite dangerous up and running. Here is the link again to the Wiki on GitHub https://github.com/redmcg/wine/wiki#using-winetricks.
Elite Dangerous on Linux Game Play
My specs just to give you an idea of what you can expect.
- CPU: Ryzen 5 2600x
- GPU: GTX 1060 6gb
- RAM: 16gb FlareX DDR4 3200 MHz
- SSD: Intel 660p NVMe SSD
Game play was smooth and I didn’t really notice much difference compared to playing on windows 10.
Update: if you are using an NVIDIA card like me and you are experiencing micro stutter. What fixed the micro stutter for me was going into the NVIDIA graphics settings and changing the power setting to prefer maximum performance.