Escape from Tarkov is hyper-realistic first person shooter game including survival, weapon personalization, looting and questing mechanics. It is a well-known game which has been available to play since 2016. However this game has stayed in Beta state since then, it is perfectly correct to call this game full featured.

Yes, the title says that GNU/Linux runs EFT (Escape from Tarkov), but does that mean that BSG (BattleStateGames), the game studio, has made a fully supported Linux port? Well, no. But that is not surprising at all!

Indeed, most popular games that run on GNU/Linux actually don’t run natively, but use a platform compatibility tool that is called Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator). This compatibility tool has been developed since 1993 by its community and with the support of CodeWeavers.

In the recent years, the company Valve, well-known for their software Steam, have been developing Proton a compatibility tool much like Wine. Actually, Proton is really just Wine but tuned by the hand of Valve for assuring that their product Steam can make their offered games run without any intervention by the user.

EFT works well on GNU/Linux

The following screen capture have been taken from within the game running on GNU/Linux.

• Choosing a map
• Configuring for offline raid
• Entering the game
• In game
• Merchants
• Starting a Game
• The hideout
• The inventory
• The main menu
• The market

There are a few YouTube videos that demonstrate it. For example, there’s this one which makes a sort of benchmark comparison between Windows and GNU/Linux:

There’s this one which demonstrates playable features, which is everything except online raids:

And there are at least 650 people playing regularly which participate in discussions on Discord.

The Steam Deck

It is worth noting that the Steam deck runs literally a fork of Archlinux. Therefore, this new product of Valve that has a ton of promises regarding the support it will provide for the Steam library and other titles is a good reason for game developers to get interested in Proton support. Indeed, it would be really nice to see EFT run on the Steam Deck and it will.

But …

There’s a catch and it has a name: BattlEye.

Indeed, because of this anti-cheat software, it is not possible to connect to the online raids which is the main attraction of this game.

This is big bummer for Tarkov Penguins (as they call themselves on Discord) that have bought the game as there is no progress saved when they play offline. But don’t think that Tarkov Penguins want to play without anti-cheat software. Anti-cheat support is exactly what they’re asking for on the EFT forums:

https://forum.escapefromtarkov.com/topic/157618-linuxmac-proton-support/ https://forum.escapefromtarkov.com/topic/161249-proton-support-a-single-e-mail-away/

and through a Twitch interview 😄:

BattlEye and Proton

BattlEye and Steam have announced it: enabling BattlEye on Proton will be as simple as sending an e-mail.

As per their official documentation for Proton:

Proton supports BattlEye and BattlEye-enabled games. Each title requires a manual configuration step, so please email your Valve or BattlEye technical contact for details.

This is the result of a months of working between BattlEye and Valve. However, this doesn’t mean that this feature cannot be enabled for non-Steam games!

Indeed, any game developer that uses BattlEye as their anti-cheat solution can send an e-mail to BattlEye and ask for updating Proton BattlEye Runtime so that it lets the game run it. That would remove the error displayed above as a screen capture and let people using GNU/Linux play ONLINE!