When I tried to play with “On-demand patching” turned on, its default setting, I had incredibly long waits in between maps. Another thing you can do in the meantime is turn off on-demand patching.
So watch “First Contact” for the hundredth time while you wait. Depending on your computer and internet connection, this may take a while. Once installed, click Play and it will open the patching dialogue.
Save those settings, restart Steam, and you should now be able to install Star Trek Online to that machine. Check “Enable Steam Play on supported devices” and then check “Enable Steam Play for all other titles.” You can change “Run other titles with” to another version of Proton but I left mine on experimental. So open Steam settings, then click on Steam Play. We need to make a quick change to Steam settings so we can install it on Linux. I’ll assume you’ve already added Star Trek Online to your Steam library.
I’m adding the multiverse library so Ubuntu knows where to find the Steam software and then I’m installing it. For example, if I were using Ubuntu, I’d do something like:Ĭode: $ sudo add-apt-repository multiverse ” You’ll usually find some easy to follow console commands. For those without the bloatware preloaded, I recommend Googling “install steam. I found that Manjaro came bundled with a Steam installer so that was super easy for me. You’ll need to get Steam working on your distro. I do encourage you to have a good understanding of installing applications and be comfortable using the console although you won’t have to do much with it. This guide isn’t a how-to for getting Linux up and running. My thinking is that if STO worked on two rolling-release distros, it should work on any of the mainstream flavors of Linux out there. I am using the Manjaro distribution of Linux for this guide but I also tested on Opensuse Tumbleweed. The Steam method gave me an easier path to installation and better game performance (especially at higher resolution) so I encourage you to use that route if possible. For those who hate Steam for whatever reason, I’ll also go through getting STO to work through the Arc Launcher. I’ll walk through the better performing and easier approach first. I tried a few different methods on two different Linux distributions on two different computers.
For this community, I thought it appropriate to try out Star Trek Online. What I should say is, “Gaming on Linux is pretty easy now!” Believe it or not, it’s now possible to get a lot of popular game titles running on Linux. But if the Linux gaming experience has always been crap, that’s not saying much.
When I pitched this article, I expected to spend a few days getting Linux set up, finding the best drivers for my Nvidia GPU, trying to pinpoint the best version of Wine (Windows Emulator), tweaking game settings, and finally settling in for a subpar Star Trek Online experience on Linux.