I compiled the engine from source and it was still totally borked on wayland and while SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=x11 helped partially, I still had to click the menu buttons at least twice to get them to respond. Any window (like Fab or a BP window) was stuck in place when it opened though, and I couldn’t drag it. Turning off tooltips in conjunction with the SDL X11 setting did help mostly. A few issues still seem to remain. The fab window for example, when you drag it, “freezes” the underlying window until you release from drag though, but it’s at least moveable now and manageable.
Yes, I can confirm that most of the issues disappeared after globally disabling pop‑up tooltips and windows in the 5.7 engine, and it has become much more well‑behaved. These pop‑ups seem to add their own overlay, and while in earlier versions it merely interfered with and slowed down interaction with the editor, in 5.7 it completely blocked the whole DE environment and then caused the editor to crash. I am running under X11; I have not tested it in a Wayland session.
Your tutorial does not cover setting up audio in the container.
If you pay attention, your editor informs you on startup that it tried and failed to intialize the audio backend and tore it down. Visible even in your linked example video.
There is no section covering GPU support in the container.
You do not specify what hardware you use, so I assume you have an AMD GPU. It only works out of the box - no further work needed - for AMD and Intel GPUs. For NVidia, extra work is needed to get all features working. This is a moderately complex topic depending on what the user wishes to do in the container.
Distrobox can change the home directory that the container uses, but your tutorial doesn’t mention that.
By default it will re-use your user’s existing home directory and merge all files and folders into it. This is usually not what you want when you mix and match distros and if you want to ensure better isolation of the UE dev environment.
No offense intended, but that tutorial looks like ChatGPT wrote it. Lots of dramatic filler text, flashy use of emoji, a misleading ‘congratulations’ style summary, and essential bits are missing.
Interestingly in my case, I’m using a 4070 Super and using rocky 8 everything seemed to work (Vulkan, Lumen, HW Raytracing) out of the box even without creating the container using --nvidia like I would typically have to do. Didn’t do a comprehensive test of everything though.
Annoyingly though running it inside of the distrobox container limited it to 50% of my CPU cores so compiling shaders took forever.
Lots of good advice here. Running UE 5.7.1 on Bazzite (Nvidia Open), I launch UE like below:
alias ue571='SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=x11 /run/media/system/hot/ue5_7_1/Engine/Binaries/Linux/UnrealEditor -windowed -ResX=3840 -ResY=2160 -nohighdpi'
I found that setting explicit resolution helps in getting crisp visual in the Editor UI and windowed mode prevents dialogues and popups from flying around. For double click, adding
[SystemSettings]
Slate.EnableTooltips=False
definitely resolves the problem. I can finally try 5.7.1 now! Been on 5.6.1, and honestly that one was easier to get going
For me, the combination of SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=x11 and Slate.EnableTooltips=False in BaseEngine.ini makes the 5.7.1 editor finally normally usable. Clicks register as they should, same as in 5.6.1.
For reference, I’m on EndeavourOS, KDE Plasma 6.5.3 in Wayland session, with AMD RX 7900XT / Mesa 25.2.7.
I’m however getting some stalls related to notifications, with every stall trace going through SDL and X11 calls.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. I’ll try to reply to each point:
No, it doesn’t cover the audio part yet.
Is it needed to cover GPU support? My guess was that containers in Distrobox are already running with the GPU flag on, but let me know.
I am aware that it changes the home directory, but at least on the machines I’ve tried, it always worked in my home directory like ~/.Documents (that’s where UE saves the projects by default).
No offense taken. Actually, I hate AI and I do not use it for my work (maybe for correcting texts), but in that tutorial it was not the case.
Yes, the tutorial is long because it covers most of the Linux versions. Regarding the “dramatic filler text,” “flashy use of emoji,” and “congratulations”. I guess I’ll have to stop using emotions and emoticons and stop saying thanks and congratulations for achieving the end of some tutorial. Unfortunately, I have to say some kind words for my students, and some things have to appeal to new people who are scared of Linux and the terminal.
That’s unfortunate. I’ve tried it on Ubuntu 22.04 (Distrobox), it also works for me, I can give you the list of libs and how to install them on Ubuntu if you want to try.
