Playing DriftwoodXI on Linux
A by-hand guide for Linux players is up on the website, and the launcher has taken its first step toward running there too.
Linux players have been asking, and the honest answer today is: the game runs under Wine, the launcher does not yet. So the website now carries a guide for doing by hand what the launcher would have done for you: Playing on Linux.
It walks through the DriftwoodXI Ashita bundle, the boot ini and the script the launcher would have written, launching through Wine, and a one-line loop that keeps the add-ons current from the same public feed the launcher reads. It also says plainly what you do without the launcher, and what the two common start-up errors mean.
What changed in the launcher
Behind the scenes, every place the launcher used to lean on a Windows-only tool now goes through one platform layer. Zip extraction, which used to run through PowerShell, now runs through a small library that works everywhere, and the process tracking and the registry reads answer honestly on other systems instead of failing. On Windows nothing looks different. The launcher can also now start the game through a Wine prefix: it works out which prefix your client lives in from the folder you point it at, writes the boot ini in that prefix's own terms, and starts Ashita through wine. And the release pipeline now builds a Linux AppImage on every launcher release, so the next launcher version will be the first one you can download for Linux: it runs the launcher, and the game still runs under Wine, which is step 1 of the guide.
If you play on Linux and something on the guide does not match your machine, say so in the Discord. What you hit is what shapes the launcher work.