Unreal Editor 5.7 UI interaction is broken on Linux for ~3 month already

General Issues and Bug Reporting
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Summary

As the title says, the UI is broken. Mouse clicks don’t work properly - you have to click 2–3 times to get a response, and if an action requires a double-click, you need to click 5–6 times. Popup menus are rendered somewhere in the center of the editor window and don’t respond to the mouse at all, while tooltips are rendered in the middle of the screen.

Please select what you are reporting on:

Unreal Editor for Fortnite

What Type of Bug are you experiencing?

UI/Tools

Steps to Reproduce

Start UE build 5.7 on Linux.
Enjoy broken UI interactions.

Expected Result

To enjoy flawless UI interactions.

Observed Result

Buttons and menus are not responding to clicks as expected.

UE 5.6 works without any issues an same system.

Platform(s)

Linux, Wayland

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isn’t 5.7 not released yet? there isn’t even a branch. so i don’t think it’s fair to expect

they are moving to sdl 3 afaik. that could break stuff.

btw i think it’s important that you share your distro and desktop environment too.

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Yes, 5.7 hasn’t been released yet but actually 5.7 existed prior to the release of 5.6, so this bug has already been around for 3+ months. Three months is enough to start worrying that such a critical bug can slip into a release.

It’s Fedora 42, Gnome, Wayland

BTW Epic games added 5.7 branch 3 days ago.

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I’d say its normal to not worry about 5.7 before 5.6 is stable. You cant expect it to work well. That’s an experimental branch.

Even as of now, 5.7 is still a working branch so its expected to be broken.

Also wayland is not supported.

I do hope they fix it, its ok to report it, but i wouldnt get very stressed about it yet.

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We already have a preview version of 5.7, but the error is still there. The release is coming soon, and then we’ll have this problem. And, of course, the same error is now present in 5.8.

6

have you tried reporting it on the ue 5.7 preview thread? or the bug tracker?

not that it will solve it, but it will bring attention to it.

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I tried to add it to the bug tracker, but the bug tracker itself is a bit… buggy, so I couldn’t add it. :rofl:

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that’s true. try adding it to that post i’ve shared, they monitor that.

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Not only on Linux, I’m on windows 11 and I’m not able to click buttons, drag windows and do most of the operations (and I’m in the preview build, not in the source build)

I hope this gets addressed before the stable release because I can’t find anything about this!

(It’s happening only on some projects, e.g. the NDisplay template)

Edit: The Windows issue was completely unrelated to the Linux one, i found a temporary solution here: Unreal 5.7 Ui not working? - #3 by ILunin

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Have the same issue on Fedora 43 wayland, I tried playing with the dpi scaling but nothing fixed it. Fab doesn’t work on 5.6 because of some cef chromium issue.

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The status of FORT-1004112 changed to ‘Needs Triage’. We’ve confirmed the issue and it’s waiting to be assigned to someone to fix it.

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I can confirm the full release has the same issues. You can slightly alleviate them by running the engine with this environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11. Even with this it’s still not great especially if you are editing blueprints. I would just recommend either using an x11 session or just skipping this one until it’s fixed.

You can go here for more information: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/updating-unreal-engine-on-linux-to-sdl3

3 Likes
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I am here to also confirm this is still broken. Fedora 42, UE 5.7

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This issue is noted here in the known issues part to not use SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/updating-unreal-engine-on-linux-to-sdl3.

Unfortunately SDL 3 will default to using Wayland on Wayland desktops such as GNOME and KDE’s newest versions. There should probably be a notice to launch with SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11 until Unreal is usable in Wayland.

2 Likes
16

Yep happens for me too in kubuntu 24

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same issue here even when setting SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11 its not any better with drop down menus still acting weird and often making my GPU drivers crash

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(post deleted by author)

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same problem on CachyOS KDE Wayland, SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11 is just going crazy spawning taskbar windows for every interaction and requiring additional clicking. To me it looks like something to do with anything that has a tooltip. UE5.5 has a similar issue with Animation Blueprint variables tooltips, same behavior of taskbar going crazy but without requiring additional clicks.

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You may try SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=x11 as well. On my Fedora 42 it fixes the issue.

Also, it looks like 5.8 works a little bit better even without SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=x11, so there is some hope.

1 Like
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For those of ye who are using labwc as wayland compositor, you can mitigate this a little bit with a window rule like such:

<windowRule identifier="UnrealEditor" title="">
<action name="SetDecorations" decorations="none"/>
<skipTaskbar>yes</skipTaskbar>
<skipWindowSwitcher>yes</skipWindowSwitcher>
<fixedPosition>yes</fixedPosition>
<ignoreFocusRequest>yes</ignoreFocusRequest>
</windowRule>

This will make labwc try its best to deny any popups or help texts from the editor from having any presence in the application bar and window switcher. At least the blueprint and material editors are usable to me like this.

Have not yet found a way to stop the editor from yanking focus to itself whenever it pops up the autosave notification though, it can be quite disorienting.