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Status of Linux Editor?

Discussion in 'Linux' started by Claytonious, Mar 2, 2020.

  1. Claytonious

    Claytonious

    Joined:
    Feb 16, 2009
    Posts:
    900
    The Linux editor suffers from these obvious blockers that are surely preventing lots of users from being successful at using it:

    * Android SDK/NDK paths and permissions are spanked by default and users have to do a lot of work in the shell to correct the problems before being able to use any Android build features, as documented in this forum thread among several others. Everybody runs into this problem and it has been around for a long time but never addressed. I have corrected things well enough to build on one Unity release, but they're broken again on latest update to 2019.3.3 and I can't justify the man hours spent fighting this odd battle this often.
    * ETC texture compression regularly fails, making any production work on Android (and many iOS) projects unworkable, as discussed here and as reported in a bug reporter case with a repro project attached here.
    * There is a serious usability problem around alt-clicking the scene view as discussed here.

    Things look good outside of these issues, at least for the particular kinds of projects our studio deals with (I know there are many other kinds), but these issues are blockers for serious production work, have been around for a long while, and they're easy to reproduce. This leads me to believe that fixing these kind of issues is not a priority at the moment. This leads me to wonder what the state of Unity on Linux is and what the actual purpose of releasing it was.

    Can anyone from Unity comment on where Unity for Linux is going and whether it's going to continue being worked on? It seems like priorities have shifted away from it for reasons that we consumers aren't privy to. Of course Unity has every prerogative to drop it at any time - it would just be much appreciated if any news about its future could be shared with this community to avoid as much wasted time as possible on our end.

    Thanks for any info!
     
  2. matkoniecz

    matkoniecz

    Joined:
    Feb 23, 2020
    Posts:
    170
    Absolutely not an expert, but 2019.3 fixed many significant issues on Linux - see https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-2019-3-0f6-on-linux-is-very-good.823407/

    And you are already complaining about ETC in https://forum.unity.com/threads/etc-compression-errors-are-a-deal-breaker.834136/ - I am dubious whatever flooding with threads is going to increase Linux version development speed

    And about alt in https://forum.unity.com/threads/linux-workflow-nuisance-alt-click-scene-view-fails-to-focus.830838/

    If this thread will be ignore what is the point of duplicating this threads? Ask on twitter, complain to support if you are a paying customer etc.
     
    Last edited: Mar 3, 2020
  3. Claytonious

    Claytonious

    Joined:
    Feb 16, 2009
    Posts:
    900
    Agreed - in fact, that was my post in the first place.

    Yes, the intent of this post wasn't to duplicate those, but to gather the major blockers into a single place and use them as the basis for asking a higher level question about the roadmap, vision and direction of Linux support for the editor. Knowing the overall strategy might make it clear why these blockers exist and maybe why they will or will not be addressed in some time frame, so that studios can plan around such things in their adoption.