Is Unity Editor reliable on Linux?

Hi,
I want to use Unity Editor 2020 and 2019 on a Linux Mint 20 system.
Is the Linux version reliable to develop games?
Thanks

 

Yes

 

Hasn't been for me so far, lots of startup crashes, memory stream errors, problems with lfs. But I'm also on integrated graphics (waiting for a gpu) so maybe that's related..

 

What is the Unity Editor version more reliable for Linux?

 

2019 versions have been running great for me on Ubuntu 20.04.

Best,
David Brooks

 

Yes, never had any stablility issues as such. 2020 feels like a great step up with responsiveness..in the past the UI was somewhat sluggish but thats fixed now...

 

@oxysofts, can you share the distro and Unity version you are running? Also, if you'd like to PM me your editor.log file from a crash feel free.

 

- Linux Mint 20 with i3-gaps
- Unity 2020.1.7f1

I will do some more tests later this week or weekend with Cinnamon instead. On a new project it works pretty well actually, it's mostly with our existing 20+ GB project that I get trouble. I'll try to send you you some editor.logs as well if I can. Thanks!

 

I am using Unity 2019 and 2020 with Linux Min 20 Cinnamon with no issues so far, just the Visual Studio Code that the intellisense does not fully work. Cinnamon is more stable and reliable than Mate.
An by the way, faster than on Windows 10

 

I have tried a few window managers on my Linux Mint, here are the results:

- Cinnamon: works
- i3-gaps: crashing
- Openbox: crashing
- Budgie: works

Crashing means on startup with a MemoryStream file corrupt error. The working window managers had a few problems too but nothing that wasn't a fixable issue. There doesn't be a log file for these file corrupt errors, the Editor.log is blank!

 

@oxysofts, may I ask what problems you had on Cinnamon?

 

@oxysofts if you can explain how to launch these things you have problems whe can check if we have the same problem

 

Given that Cinnamon uses GNOME, you'll probably have the most success there. We *only* test against GNOME at present.

 

Yeah I definitely didn't expect these unusual setups to be as smooth sailing, but I think if we're gonna support Linux officially then we should really do our best to move towards full support of all the WMs that are fairly popular with developers. (within reason, of course)

That being said, after further testing it seems that it does in fact work decently in other WMs such as awesomewm, i3 and openbox. In fact, it turns out that the memorystream corruption issue does occur on cinnamon as well. It seems that opening an empty project first, closing the editor, then opening our larger main project will fix this issue, regardless of the WM. I believe it persists if you do this procedure then log out and back into a different wm, which is why my results were inconsistent at first.

I have a feeling the issue is related to some editor window opening mid import (the dialog that says "Importing assets" during editor startup with the splash image). I have noticed that whenever the MemoryStream error comes up, there is always a window with the title "Editor Update Check" (or something along those lines) which opens up. The window is blank save for the WM titlebar, the editor crashes before anything can render. Moreover, in the editor.log I notice some logging related to Gtk right before the MemoryStream corrupted line. I will shortly PM you with an editor.log which shows this.

And with that, I have been able to get into the editor and do some work for a few days! There are 4 bugs I've encountered so far: two of them are mild annoyances, one is fairly big but not a deal breaker, and one is breaking (but can be somewhat worked around for the time being). I will save these for later however since I have have been working exclusively in awesome this week after figuring out how to get the editor to start, and have not confirmed yet whether these issues are found in other wms as well. (I suspect two of those will, and the other two I am almost 99% sure are only found in i3 and awesome)

 

Just wanted to leave an update here: Linux support is actually wonderful now, nearly a perfect experience. DO NOT install the flatpak or unofficial distributions from ANY software manager. Get the most official appimage from Unity.

 

Which Unity version are you using now?

 

A lot of annoying bugs were fixed in 2020.2, but it is unusable now because of a 10fps bug. New input system is broken too. See below a short overview.

Show stoppers

1271213 [Linux] Performance Regression in Play Mode while using the Editor on Linux. Play mode is unable to reach more than 10FPS
Fix In Review for 2020.2

InputSystem related show stoppers

1275964 InputSystem not mapping keyboard keys properly on Linux
Fix In Review for 2020.2
Fix In Review for 2020.1

1252149 Mouse position values reported as half of thier actual values in screen pixels when display scaling is set to 200%
Fixed in 2020.1.8f1
Fixed in 2020.2.0a17

1248389 [Linux] InputSystem's Mouse delta values do not change when the Cursor lockState is set to Locked
Active

Annoying bugs

1131492 [Linux] Hovering over console messages also hovers over hierarchy elements
Fixed in 2020.2.0a20

1258663 [Linux] Editor doesn't restore window scale when loading saved layouts
Planned for 2019.4
Fix In Review for 2020.1
Fixed in 2020.2.0b2

1153310 [Linux] Mouse cursor does not update when moving it to Game view
Fixed in 2020.1

 

Pity, because everything run faster on Linux.

 

There was an update yesterday regarding the Linux Editor:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/linux-editor-official-release-update.998968/