Will Unity ever be on Linux?

I understand that, especially this far into Unity's development, that this would be a daunting, if not impossible, task. However, more and more of the gaming community is moving away from proprietary and towards open source, especially with the indie movement. This is the type of environment that Linux caters to. So my question is, does anybody even know if the Unity team is even considering it?

 

It's been asked quite some times already.
Short answer: No.

Long answer: Not anytime soon. With the current situation on the market they don't think it's worth the effort. If I remember correctly, Unity is available for OSX because it was the initial platform. (In case you wonder how it comes that it's available for OSX, given that it also has little relevance on the market compared to Windows)
Will Unity ever be on Linux? How is anyone supposed to answer this question?

I'd love to be able to switch to Linux for development. I really do. It's just that they made it perfectly clear that there are no plans and thus I don't wait for it.

 

Even if OS X wasn't the initial platform I am pretty sure they would've ported it because of the rather significant iOS platform.

But yes, Linux would be nice but from what I've heard it won't happen anytime soon.

 

A much more important reason for the OS X version is that you have to support OS X for iOS development. Even if Windows was first, they'd have to support OS X to get iOS.

As for Linux it's a numbers game:

How many people exclusively use Linux?
Of those how many are game developers?
Of those how many would actually spend money on Unity?

My guess is those numbers drop off pretty quickly to the point where the investment to Unity isn't worth it compared to other things they can spend their engineering time on.

 

Thanks for the quick response everybody, pity about it but I can totally understand their reasoning. Hopefully, if Valve and indie devs have their way, that will change sometime soon though.

 

Those things take time.

 

Well Valve look like they are trying to shunt the home of PC gaming off of Windows and onto Linux / SteamOS.
Personally the only reason I have Windows installed is due to VS / Unity If I could do that natively from Ubuntu I would only have Ubuntu installed on my machine.

 

Please, don't posting it. It has already been discussed many and many times

 

Some guys have success used over wine (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/211059-Unity3D-on-Linux-with-Wine-Support-thread/page2). But it is good to have a window machine ready if needed (like a mac specifically used to build ios).

For a native editor, I have some hope if SteamOs succeds.

 

Right now you can make iOS builds with the Windows Editor too. The only thing you still need a Mac for is to build the Xcode project. All the Unity bits are platform independent now.

Had Unity started out as a Windows application, I'm pretty sure this would've been the initial workflow for creating iOS builds, instead of something added in version 4.x.

 

If enough people will post threads like that, Linux editor will come. Until it does, I'm using Godot for any new project and finishing my current project via VMWare (sorry, I need Asset Store so wine trick is not for me as it has troubles with AS).

 

Given that Android is a subset of linux with a modified Kernel, I'm not sure how much effort it would be to port Unity to Linux if SteamOS puts more Linux OSes on computers.

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/How-Much-Linux-Is-in-Android
https://www.linux.com/news/embedded...63597-5-good-android-tidings-for-the-holidays

Android shows that it's not right to say "Linux is a small OS". In fact, a flavour of it is the biggest all around and is on far more devices than Windows. That said, Android is heavily modified for touch-screen, and for the hardware limits of a smart-phone or a tablet.

 

Android isn't particularly relevant since you're not going to be using Unity on a phone. You won't see an iOS port either, even though iOS has a pretty large marketshare. There's a huge difference between having Unity games running on Linux (which, of course, it already does) and having the editor running on Linux.

--Eric

 

What I wanted to get at was the idea that linux is small. It's not. And the technological advances keep pushing things up. There are now already quasi-laptop-tablets running on ARM chips and such. Moore's law in action, I guess. And those are often, not always, running Android. So, Android changes too, and becomes more and more expansive. And next year, or the year after that, what's to say you can't develop on a laplet, if I can coin that term. ^^

You also have Ubuntu moving over to phones, and they're working on a unified OS. You are supposed to be able to dock your smartphone to a monitor, and can then run your smartphone or tablet as a desktop.

 

It is on the desktop, which is the only thing that matters regarding having the Unity editor run on Linux. Android could run every phone on the planet and it still wouldn't get Unity ported any faster. Linux also runs tons of servers, and that doesn't help either. The argument never ever was about Linux being "small" in general, it was always about the desktop.

--Eric