Although it may not be earth-shattering news, it's never fun to post news that affects a segment of a gaming population. But that was the case when the EVE Online developer responsible for porting the client to the Mac and Linux had to announce that the team was dropping Linux support from their enormous online space simulation. Here's the official word:

As some of you may know, I am also the producer in charge of the project bringing EVE Online to the Mac and Linux operating systems. In order to achieve this aim, we are working in partnership with Transgaming Technologies, utilizing their Cider engine to allow EVE Online to run on the Mac OS and their Cedega engine to enable operation under Linux. This project went live in late 2007 and in that time we have seen the same slow, steady growth in the numbers of users of the Mac client that has characterized the growth of EVE Online throughout its history. However we have not seen any similar growth in the numbers using our Linux client.

It is for this reason that I am sorry to have to announce that from the 10th of March onwards CCP will no longer be officially supporting the Linux operating system. The low amount of users of the Linux client did not justify the degree of additional complexity having three operating systems imposes on our development and release schedules. There is the matter of maintaining the hardware infrastructure to facilitate the development work, spending man-hours on testing and diagnosing faults in the client as well as regression testing. While we did embark on this project with the aim of being one of the few MMOG’s on the market offering a game client for all of the major operating system architectures, we feel that the time and resources that were being spent on the Linux client would be better utilized in areas where more players would benefit from them.

I would like to thank those users who supported our efforts to bring EVE to the Linux OS. The feedback and commitment we obtained from many of you helped both CCP and Transgaming with our attempts to improve on the quality and stability of the client. I am sure this announcement will cause a rather emotional response, and all I can offer as a counter is that this was not an easy decision to make. Many of us in CCP use Linux and are convinced of its merits as an operating system. We did our best to identify all of our current subscribers who were using the Linux client and contacted each of them prior to this blog to make them aware of the change and to offer them some options on how to continue playing EVE through other emulators. We apologize if there were some who did not receive that notice and invite them to read this knowledgebase article.

It sounds like this won't be a huge blow to the EVE community, but I'm sure it was a hard decision for CCP to make.