EliteDangerous gamescope MangoHud MinEdLauncher OBS Steam

Elite Dangerous

1.0 2.0 4.0

Visiting Hong Kong cavaliers
Visiting Hong Kong cavaliers

Primary Buffer Panel

All works.

There are a bunch of videos showcasing Elite Dangerous with my Primary Buffer Panel on my YouTube and PeerTube accounts.

Launch parameters

Like most games does this one also not detect a screen layout but only the primary display on a Linux PC so it won’t offer the maximum resolution possible e.g. with a triple head setup đŸ–Ĩī¸đŸ–Ĩī¸đŸ–Ĩī¸. This can be worked around in multiple ways, e.g. with configuring a virtual desktop in the WINEPREFIX, by adding a virtual monitor to the system or simply by making use of gamescope, the SteamOS session compositing window manager.

Here is an example how games may be started from Steam by adding the following commands to the start parameters (That’s basically the same for e.g. Lutris btw).

gamescope -h 1200 -w 5760 -H 1200 -W 5760 -b -e – %command%

This is not needed if only one monitor is used for gaming.

I launch Elite Dangerous from Steam and for most people it’ll be just click Play. Elite had this atrocious overloaded and slow launcher though so I switched to MinEdLauncher instead, which would also kindly chainload further 3rd party apps for me.

The new launcher Elite Dangerous got a few weeks ago is a lot faster and also very minimalistic. Good thing we have choices though. Here are a bunch of ways I launch Elite depending on what I’m going to do:

Launch within gamescope for proper screen size, show MangoHud overlay, use MinEdLauncher and launch directly into Elite Dangerous: Odyssey:

gamescope -h 1200 -w 5760 -H 1200 -W 5760 -b -e – mangohud ./MinEdLauncher %command% /autorun /autoquit /EDO

Start MinEdLauncher from a gnome-terminal and launch directly into Elite Dangerous: Horizons:

gnome-terminal – ./MinEdLauncher %command% /autorun /autoquit /EDH

Start MinEdLauncher from a gnome-terminal and launch directly into Elite Dangerous: Odyssey while allowing access to the Vulkan rendering for recording in OBS Studio

obs-gamecapture gnome-terminal – mangohud ./MinEdLauncher %command% /autorun /autoquit /EDO