Hi everyone,
Just wanted to share my experience with the Unreal Engine 5.8.0 Preview on Linux so you don’t waste time downloading it if you have a similar setup.
Currently, the editor is highly unstable on Ubuntu 26.04 with NVIDIA cards (tested on an RTX 3060 Ti and Ryzen 7 5700X). In my experience, the editor crashes within 10 seconds of launching, and opening a project causes a crash in about 3 seconds.
Why it’s happening
It looks like the move to SDL 3.2.10 in this version is causing a protocol conflict with Wayland’s Explicit Sync and current NVIDIA drivers. The specific error in the logs is: wp_linux_drm_syncobj_surface_v1#149: error 2: Explicit Sync only supported on dmabuf buffers
Basically, the Wayland server kills the connection immediately because of a sync mismatch.
If you still want to try it
If you absolutely need to test 5.8 features, you can bypass the crash by forcing XWayland before running the editor: export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11 && ./UnrealEditor
However, for daily work, I’d recommend staying on your current stable UE version for now. 5.8 is definitely not ready for Linux users in this preview build!
Stay safe and happy developing!