Question - Any other linux users that I can commiserate with? :) (2 Viewers)

[Micro_Mega_Mini]

I switched to linux in general a few years back when I got my steam deck (was floored by what it could do), and for the most part, I don't have any issues running any games I want to on it, or anything else. EQ1 + MQ has been a bit of a chore (EQ itself being the bigger of the two problematically), and I was hoping to glean some knowledge from those of you who are on linux runningEQ1+MQ as well for some issues I've more or less just dealt with up until now:

Running CachyOS on an AMD 9900X cpu with a 7900xtx GPU as my setup, outputting to a 4k tv since my old ass can see a larger screen much better in general, especially with presbyopia starting to set in.

For any of you that play at 4k, it's no secret that the EQ1 UI doesn't scale well at all. There's a few ways I've found around this, but neither works that great: I can use winecfg to set the DPI scale for the prefix EQ/MQ is using (the default in this case, but I've also created EQ-specific prefixes as well). This works to get things more readable, at the cost of blurriness and loss of graphical fidelity, BUT, if you have DXVK installed in for the prefix, it doesn't work right. The graphics will scale much better, but the text scaling gets broken to the point of being completely illegible. Without DXVK, however, EQ sees my gpu as an old radeon HD 5600 (lol), and the game takes a big performance hit. On top of that, if I try to run with shadows on, the game will crash within an hour of play consistently. Not ideal. The third option, which works pretty well is to use gamescope to force the game to run internally at 1080p and use FSR to upscale to 4k. This works fine with DXVK and looks fantastic. (You can do this in Windows with lossless scaling as well). HOWEVER, MQ does not like being ran through gamescope. At all. Crashes every single time for me. So using this option to fire up MQ and launch the game from there is a no-go. Have any of you found a good solution for this?

On the MQ itself front: It's been largely problem-free for the most part with running RG mercs and plugins like the Autoforage. There are two things that have been bugging me that I would appreciate any advice/help with, though: When starting up MQ, I always get a compatibility layer error (screenshot below). This only happens on my desktop, not my laptop, which are configured identically. It doesn't seem to affect anything as far as I can tell, but If it's somethign that needs to be corrected, does anyone have any tips on how to do so? Lastly, the DanNet plugin-required buttons (Come to Me, Follow Me, etc...) have never worked for me. I have made sure the plugin is indeed loaded in MQ, but still no joy. Perhaps related to the error I mentioned above? That said it doesnt work on my laptop either, which doesn't throw that error when launching MQ.

 

[Hadler]

I am down to just one windows machine and it is mostly because I haven't found a way to get EQ/MQ/dannet working clean on linux

 

[Micro_Mega_Mini]

I am down to just one windows machine and it is mostly because I haven't found a way to get EQ/MQ/dannet working clean on linux

I feel you. I have a dual-boot setup, but I loathe going back into Windows for anything. So far I have not found a way to get everything working 100% either, there are at least some concessions I must make to run this in linux. I did make one discovery that "sort of" gets things working better in 4k by using winetricks to manually set the renderer to use vulkan *without* having dxvk installed. This allows the DPI scaling to work properly and have my GPU correctly detected by EQ so that shadows don't crash the game. But with this discovery comes yet another new problem: Only the EQ client window being focused runs at full framerate. The others are a slide slow if you try to mouse over them in the taskbar in windowed mode. Not a *huge* deal, but the bigger impact of this is that when zoning, ALL of the EQ windows freeze until loading the new zone has been completed for each and every window, so I have to zone each toon fully, one-by-one.

Regarding dannnet, I found this thread for Linux users that indicates dannet not working in linux and EQBC as an alternative. I havent dug ino it deep enough to try anything yet as I am still fiddling with trying to get an acceptable image/performance at 4k: https://www.redguides.com/community/resources/the-new-linux-and-mq-guide.2948/

 

[Cybris]

As far as Dannet goes, it varies by distro if it works or not.

The compatibility layer error you can ignore, but if you want to get rid of them, you can set up the following registry keys in your Wine Bottle.

1. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
2. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

 

[Micro_Mega_Mini]

As far as Dannet goes, it varies by distro if it works or not.

The compatibility layer error you can ignore, but if you want to get rid of them, you can set up the following registry keys in your Wine Bottle.

1. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
2. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

Thank you for this, should be simple enough. I guess CachyOS is one of said distros where it doesn't currently work. Not for me, at least. I've still been able to use RGMercs though, which has been great. I just need to learn finer control of it. There's only so much you can just faceroll through ><

 

[boxbuddy]

I just write EQBC compatibility shims for anything that requires dannet. EQBC on linux is far superior to EQBC on Windows, especially if you compile EQBC for Linux. Think there's a quick explainer for how to do it on the Wiki page for EQBC... For CachyOS I had to download the build for LibSafeC (Safelibc? Forget the exact package name) and compile it with unsafe flags in order to get it to run & compile EQBC correctly. For Ubuntu, the safelibc package works right from apt, but there was something wrong with it from the AUR whenever i was doing it for Cachy.

For my main PC I run Ubuntu 26, and have Cachy on 2 of my older machines. The latest kernel updates are pretty frickin awesome. My household has been Windows free since ~2024 and I couldn't be happier.