Epic Games has not distinguished itself by taking Linux users into account; without going any further, its Epic Games Store lacks an official client for the operating system created by Linus Torvalds (fortunately, there are several unofficial options available). As far as its Unreal Engine graphics engine is concerned, your companion game creation tool Unreal Engine EditorThey have been running Linux for years…
…but its installation process has always been unnecessarily complex for the user with little advanced knowledge of Linux, requiring steps such as compiling the software before proceeding to install it. That is, the solution provided by Epic Games was far from ideal.
LINUX and GNU: LINUX: WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT WORKS
Compiling is going to end!
However, now we know Unreal Engine 5 account recently, but with an installation package as such, yes with a zip file that we will only have to unzip in the folder that we prefer before running the engine, without the need for complex compilations. That is, for the first time Epic Games directly provides us with the executables.
And the most curious thing is that, despite the importance of this step, the company has done very little to promote it: the news has only begun to spread in the last few hours on the Internet, despite the fact that the download file has been online for 10 days.
To download ityou will only need to access their website, log in (and therefore have a user account) accept the license of use, and click on the link. After that, you just have to wait for the download of the more than 20 GB that the software occupies to finish, although the website mentions the need to have some 60 GB free disk space once Unreal Engine is unzipped and running.
Other requirements of the equipment in which we install it are to have with a 64 bit Ubuntu 22.04 (although GamingOnLinux claims to have tested it without problems on a Fedora 36 install) and, recommended, with the compiler clang 13.0.1 (or higher), and with an IDE such as Visual Studio Code, CLion or QtCreator (we cite only the examples cited by Epic Games). In terms of hardware, the only requirement is to have a graphics card with a minimum of 8 GB of memory.
To run the editoronce we have decompressed the file, we must execute the command ‘./Linux_Unreal_Engine_5.0.3/Engine/Binaries/Linux/UnrealEditor’ from the same directory.