It's age of revival for space games. Being long dormant genre, there's rekindled interest about traveling vast distances, witnessing alien suns and worlds, and witness strange cosmic phenomena. "Elite: Dangerous", fourth sequel of space sim classic Elite, is leading the pack and continues to see development after first release.

Free and highly popular operational system GNU/Linux, used in various setups around the world, has been space geeks favorite for years. It has seen all Elite clones and ports - like OOlite or Pioneer - and it has quite a share of commercial space sims, even online ones - like Vendetta Online.

Having been standardized and popularized by commercial entities as desktop OS for last 8 years, Linux also finally seeing attention it deserves as potential gaming platform - major PC games distributor Valve together with manufacturers plans to release lineup of PC based gaming consoles this year using Linux as platform, with number of AAA games like Civilization V, Witcher 2 or Metro series already ported and running using Steam on current crop of mainstream Linux OS like Ubuntu or Fedora. While Linux market share is still deemed small, it's user base has been both enthusiastic and supportive towards Linux ports of all kind of games. For example, in Steam there's about 70M gamers with Linux as main operational system.

As promised during Kickstarter, Mac OS X port of "Elite: Dangerous" is being worked on and it is mentioned that beta is coming in few months time. It uses OpenGL for it's 3D graphics engine - same what's used in Linux games. This means that technology wise there could be comparingly little work to port "Elite: Dangerous" to Linux - which is subject of this petition. I plead to Frontier Developments to consider doing a port. Primary goal is port itself, but also having approximate calculations how much port would cost would help FD to better make decision seeing how much support this petition will get.

Why it would be worth for developers to consider Linux port? Thanks to Valve and community efforts, at this point Linux as gaming platform has best performance on PC, and improvements keep coming in. As mentioned above, this year Valve launches SteamOS, it's Debian Linux based gaming platform which can be easily used as reference for potential port, as it has both Valve and commercial vendor support. But major reason is that there's very strong Linux gamers community who prefer space games, and are ready to support any of them coming to their platform. Lot of them has already supported ED without even promise from FD to consider it later on. Lot of them have said they will certainly consider buying ED if it will come to Linux.

This petition also will serve as a way to indicate how many commanders are ready to consider to buy a copy of ED if Linux port is available. But even if you have copy already, support this petition to show FD how many gamers wants to see Linux port done.