Why no Linux support?

General Feedback & Requests
1

There are VR channel in the forums , HTML5, Android and iOS but no Linux?

You Epic Games use open source libs in your engine everywhere but don’t even give support to an open source OS ?

So no time to support Linux, but you got time to support VR and create a version of the editor for VR that got less users ? By the way the status of the support in Linux looks like pretty bad, starting by the OpenGL features or Vulkan.

Is just me, or you Epic Games are supporting only the big companies since a year ago ? (Not just by the low support to linux, but by the type of features and fixes made this year, when are content requested by users since 2 years ago in the roadmap and never made or even bugs waiting to be fixed since more than a year ago Live streaming from the GDC Show Floor - Events - Unreal Engine Forums, but Epic Games keep adding just what they need in the engine for their games, this is fine since is their product, but well…)

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2

I hope you remember the tweet about microsoft trying to monopolize gaming. DirectX is the only thing that is preventing the switch to Linux for games. Its 300% faster than OpenGL most of the times (let’s not argue about use cases and new shader models etc. OGL is just slow.). Alright there might be some windows-exclusive libraries but with the cross-compilation this is solved. On Linux, you’ve got access to the kernel as well. That means you can further integrate tools and perhaps the engine.

OS X has similar limitations as well. Not only due to the apple ecosystem but also, the lack of DirectX (and the lack of good graphic cards in non-superexpensive consumer models).

CLR turned open source but has yet to be properly adopted by linux and os x. Rumors state that there is minimal support for these as well. Hopefulyl microsoft is going to make DX open source in the future? I doubt it.

There is Ubuntu Studio , which is meant for art people to mess around with and make the switch. But still, nobody uses it.

Also, does anyone remember the “nVidia BEEP you” statement from Linus Torvalds?

Linux has always been a FIY os as well. I will try to make the switch later this year :slight_smile: .

3

Well there’s a Linux version of the editor, though there’s no version of the launcher yet. It’s true there’s no Linux section of the forums, but there isn’t one for Mac either which has more support.

4

Don’t lose hope yet! Our estimates for the Linux Editor binary release of October 2025 could still come true.

Once all the other fads wear off (VR, AR, holoportation, etc.) Epic will look into the Linux Editor. Right after they clear the back-log of PRs, which should incidentally happen around August 2025.

On the other hand, we could just make the Linux thing happen without Epic. A small handful of us achieved much already, so imagine what could be done with a large dedicated group, and a more concentrated effort.

If only there were people willing to really dig in… :slight_smile:

EDIT: Was just talking to about the VR Editor, so I’d like to make a prediction here that we’ll see a binary (Windows at that) release of the VR Editor sooner than the Linux one. #justsaying

5

You can run UE4 on linux, as darthviper107 said.

I think a lot more could be done by epic to help the linux community, I thought it was pretty bald of Tim Sweeney to talk about fighting microsoft when so much more could be done by epic to support alternatives to microsoft.
It’s not just Linux that is important either, better support for a non-Visual Studio work flow, such as the clang C++ compiler is all part of the struggle of fighting against microsoft.

6

There is absolutely Linux support, both for the editor and runtime. We’re making our game with Linux, we’ll be shipping our game for Linux.

What’s missing right now is the launcher. You still need a Windows PC to download store assets.

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7

EPIC should better invest more on Linux than playing around with VR that no one uses.

8

You could say the same about Linux. :smiley:

If you trust in Steams Hardware & Software Survey you can see that only 0.9% of all Steam-Users are using Linux and 95.6% are using Windows. Most companies don’t care about Linux atm.

9

Saying the Linux user base is small is only true in a relative fashion. Or, do you consider a group of a million plus people to be a “small” group?

12

It’s really really unlikely that Linux is going to suddenly become popular, same as that Windows Phone would suddenly become really popular.

13

Also, performance is better on Windows. Mostly due to DX.

14

I am sorry to interrupt this conversation so lately, but saying that the performance is better on wndows - mostly due to DX is complete, absolute, unchallengeable garbage. No, DX is NOT 300% faster (which, in a mathematical point of view would mean 4 times as fast as OpenGL btw - get the mistake? u know - hardware and stuff? computational power of graphics cards? never heard of them? - well), it WAS just EASIER TO USE on windows plaforms. OpenGL on the other hand can be watched to greatly outperform DX in some special optimized cases and has a much vaster out-of-the-box hardware support. And with the new Vulkan api which on the other hand greatly outperforms OpenGL in general, DX is, in my eyes, totally obsolete because it’s single-platform, not open-source (and these things tend to be ten times more crappy than open-cource codebases) and gives no real benefit compared to alternatives. So - you may ask - why did the people use DX in the first place? 2 answers: 1. Money( with microsoft making contracts with game developers to exclusively use their platform and api ) and 2. because OpenGL, in its first decades, was ****** TO USE.
I hope that I made a point here. Thank you for your patience.

15

Yeah, well, we benchmarked our UE4 game on Windows vs Linux and the Windows build does run 30% faster. I’m not sure if it’s really because DirectX is better, if DirectX is just simpler to use, or if UE4 devs are just bad with OpenG, but performance is really better on Windows.

We’re not here to trade insults and trash talk. Please be civil.

16

Well, I’m not gonna lie, Linux is not very used, but I’d like that, and I’d like more support on it so users could decide which OS to choose. Windows sucks so bad at times.

17

The way to end this problem is for everyone here on this forum reading this is to go and download Linux. (Ubuntu is a great choice for you guys who no nothing!)
Than show that a lot of us like and use it and would love more support. get your friends to use it on their pc! (So their is more of a market for games!)

it is only a matter of time before we take over the world and the world know the superiority of Linux! (Mostly a pipe dream…)

Also, Linus was totally right about NVidia. Their stupid cards will not work right with Linux anymore. I had to go to AMD to use Debian correctly.
after upgrading, I noticed Ubuntu and others sped up A LOT. So AMD for the win in making sure their stuff actually works with the other OS’s!

Now what about RISC OS on the raspberry pi? Could we get UE4 on that! :smiley: (A true pipe dream!)

18

Where is the Linux version of Unreal Engine for me to download? It used to be in github, but … Hmmm

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