I know that the Unreal Editor can cross compile from Windows to Linux. Most people who use Unreal are on Windows, so it makes sense that they’d want to cross-compile. But, look at it from the other side: installing Linux is trivial. You can just download it and run it on pretty much anything. Installing Windows requires a license key and legal requirements. None of this may be a problem for a professional studio, but for hobbyists, it very much is. I’m on Linux (obviously), and I’d like to build my small Unreal experiments for friends on Windows. I’m just trying things out for now. Currently, all I can do is push my changes to Github. But the person I’m sharing this with is not much of a coder and will most likely not like to build on his Windows machine at all.
If it truly is too much work to do cross-compiling for Windows from Linux, could there be some sort of unofficial guide people who might be interested in setting it up? The Unreal build files (the .cs files) look very puzzling and I can’t find much documentation for them.
You know what? That had not actually crossed my mind. It would not be the most convenient thing, but it’s certainly much, much easier than using a virtual machine. If running the Unreal Editor from Wine is known to work, then it’s a perfectly acceptable possibility. I actually assumed that, given how specific Unreal’s hardware demands were, it was a non-starter.
Proton is more complicated because it must be started from Steam, which ends up being yet an extra layer in practice. But if there is no other way, it’s also doable.