A few days ago, I had the great pleasure of speaking at this year’s GermanDevDays in Frankfurt Germany about how well Linux is currently suited for game development. I’ve written a few articles about Linux in the past, but I hadn’t yet summarized them with a specific focus on game development. When I was asked after the talk if I could make the slides available, that’s when I came up with the idea for this article.
Perhaps it would have been enough to simply offer the slides for download, but I believe that presentation slides alone are generally not very informative. After all, the audio track is missing. So I thought I’d expand on the content a bit to make it more accessible. As a nice side effect, this also creates an English version. I had also submitted an English version of the presentation for this year’s gamescom dev, but unfortunately, I received a rejection for it just two hours after my presentation at GermanDevDays 😥
For anyone for whom Linux is a completely new topic, I recommend reading my article Linux? What the penguin!? beforehand, since I go over a bit of the history there and explain the basic terms.
Linux is everywhere
These days, we find Linux almost everywhere. A great many people use Linux, even if they aren’t aware of it:
- 🧮 All of the Top 500 supercomputers run on Linux
- 🌐 A large portion of the servers on the Internet run on Linux
- ☁️ A large portion of the “cloud” runs on Linux
- ☎️ A large portion of smartphones run on Linux (Android)
- 📖 Many e-book readers run on Linux (Amazon Kindle, Tolino, …)
- 🕸️ Many routers run on Linux (AVM Fritz!Box, ASUS RT, Netgear, TP-Link, OpenWRT, …)
Even Microsoft announced in 2024 that Linux accounts for an impressive 60% of the systems running on its own cloud platform, Azure. Microsoft now even offers its own Linux distribution with Microsoft Azure Linux.
Linux and Game Development
To get a slightly better overview of what Linux has to offer in the field of game development — and specifically, which software runs on Linux — I’ve tried to categorize the various aspects of game development accordingly.
Solid Foundation / Linux Distribution
Distrowatch lists 467 different Linux distributions. And if you take a look at the Linux Distribution Timeline on Wikipedia, it doesn’t exactly make things any clearer. So I’ve come up with a few considerations that, in my opinion, should be taken into account for professional use (YMMV):
- Stability is more important than the last few percent of performance
- Optimized maintenance effort saves time and, therefore, money, i.e.,
- Long support periods => security updates for a long time => fewer operating system upgrades required
- Good official support from vendors of relevant commercial products is desirable
Therefore, my recommendation is Rocky Linux in combination with Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL). Rocky Linux typically offers 5 years of full support for major releases (including 2 minor releases per year / service packs) and then another 5 years of security updates. In addition, commercial vendors that offer official Linux versions of their software generally support Rocky Linux.
If Rocky Linux is too conservative for you (which I can totally understand), I’d recommend Fedora. Fedora and Rocky Linux share the same roots, but Fedora isn’t quite as conservative as Rocky Linux when it comes to updates, so you’d typically need to upgrade about once a year. But since this is factored in, the upgrade is usually quick and hassle-free.
Tools
I include in the Tools category all the software that pretty much everyone probably uses (or could use) in some way in their daily work. And if you take a look at the list below, you might notice that it includes the usual suspects you may already be familiar with from Windows.
Version Control System
Build & Deployment
Further Tools
Game Engines
There are significant differences in the level of support for Linux as a development platform. There are two general limitations that apply to all game engines:
- There is no DirectX on Linux, so modern game engines typically use Vulkan on Linux.
- Console manufacturers likely do not currently offer their SDKs for Linux. But no one is allowed to talk about this for sure, since this information is subject to the console manufacturers’ NDAs 😉
Godot offers nearly full support for Linux as a development platform. I use Godot myself several times a week on Linux without any issues, and to my knowledge, many of the project maintainers use Linux as their default operating system.
Unity also offers a wide range of features on Linux. For example, it includes cross-compilation for Windows, although there is a limitation in that neither UWP nor IL2CPP are supported for Windows. My own experience with Unity dates back 6 years, and I can confirm that cross-compilation worked relatively smoothly back then.
Unreal Engine currently offers a very limited set of features on Linux. At the moment, there is no native cross-compilation support, so it’s not possible to build a Windows version of projects using Unreal on Linux. However, since UE 5, a precompiled version has been available, so you don’t have to compile it yourself right away when getting started. Otherwise, depending on your setup, there may be some compatibility issues with newer UE 5 versions on Linux. If you’d like to know more about this, I’ve covered the topic in more detail in the past: Unreal Engine on Linux
In my personal experience, the Unreal Editor runs fairly stably on Linux, and I’ve encountered very few issues while using it over the past six months, e.g. as part of my lecture series.
Otherwise, through pleasant and interesting conversations with developers from various studios, I’ve learned that there are also Linux versions of various custom engines, even if the games never officially receive a native Linux version. The effort is often avoided because it’s easier (especially for smaller studios) to ensure compatibility with Proton.
Programming, Debugging, and Profiling Tools
There’s really not much to complain about in this category.
IDEs
Debugging and Profiling
- gdb
- lldb
- Valgrind
- Tracy
- Superluminal (currently as alpha)
- RenderDoc
- NVIDIA Nsight Graphics
- …
2D Assets
In the 2D space, the picture is more nuanced. Probably the biggest limitation or adjustment for many professional 2D artists is that Adobe Cloud isn’t available on Linux. As a result, neither Adobe Photoshop nor Adobe Illustrator is available. However, there’s an interesting new competitor to Photoshop called Fog Panther. With the current version 0.8.1, it will likely take some time before it offers a similar range of features, but from what I’ve seen so far, Fog Panther, unlike other alternatives, is modeled after Photoshop workflows, which makes a potential switch much easier.
Pixel Art
Illustration
Vector
- Inkscape
- Affinity Designer (*)
- Affinity by Canva (*)
- …
2D Animation
*) Although Affinity doesn’t currently offer a native Linux version, there are now convenient ways to get it running using Wine. I’ve written about this before in a previous article.
3D Assets
In the 3D realm, things look a bit better again, at least as long as you leave sculpting out of the equation. Both Blender and 3D Coat offer sculpting capabilities, and Nomad Sculpt can apparently run using Wine or Proton. So far, virtually everyone I’ve met who has professional demands in the field of sculpting swears by ZBrush, which unfortunately doesn’t currently offer a Linux version.
Even though Adobe Cloud isn’t available on Linux, you don’t have to do without Substance products, since you can get them via Steam—and even with native Linux versions. Not everything always works flawlessly, but the team behind it at Adobe is working hard to fix the issues, and you can also find helpful tips in the community discussions. I find this thread particularly interesting, as it sometimes provides solutions to problems that Adobe itself hasn’t yet resolved 🤯
But here, at long last, is the list of possible software for 3D asset creation:
Modelling
Baking and Texturing
- Blender
- 3DCoat
- Adobe Substance 3D Painter
- Adobe Substance 3D Designer
- Marmoset Toolbag 5 (*)
- InstaMAT
- MaterialMaker
- …
Simulation
*) Marmoset Toolbag 5 runs surprisingly well with Wine. I described the exact steps for doing this here beschrieben.
Audio
Audio is the only area here that I know little to nothing about. So it’s quite possible that there are opportunities in this area that I’m not aware of.
Audio creation
Audio management
Why Linux at all?
There are plenty of reasons to choose Linux, and it’s very easy to get emotional about it. But since emotions can sometimes lead us to ignore logical arguments, here are some objective points to consider:
- File System & Build Performance
- Common file systems under Linux (ext4, Btrfs) offer noticeably faster file access compared to NTFS when dealing with large repositories and asset folder structures
- Linux provides more efficient multithreading during CPU-intensive compilation processes thanks to optimized schedulers
- Minimal Resource Usage
- A lean operating system means more RAM, VRAM, and CPU cycles are available for the engine, IDE, and graphics tools
- There are no artificial hardware restrictions; for example, TPM 2.0 is not mandatory
- Full System Control
- No forced updates or reboots in the middle of long rendering, baking, or build processes
- No bloatware or forced cloud services running in the background
- CI/CD symmetry
- Since many build servers run on Linux, local development environments can be set up identically to those on the build servers
- No more “works on my machine” issues with build scripts
Conclusion
Will Linux be a suitable operating system for game development in 2026? The answer, as is so often the case, is: It depends.
There’s no such thing as a perfect operating system, so with Linux, you make conscious compromises. But you also make compromises with Windows, even if they’re different. Many people aren’t fully aware of these compromises, though, since some of them have grown up with it and don’t know any different. Others have accepted these compromises over the years—initially grudgingly, due to a lack of visible alternatives—and no longer even notice them. The same can be true for Linux. The world isn’t just 1-bit color depth here either; it’s not simply black or white, but consists of a multitude of shades of gray.
Modern toolchains generally also allow team members to use the operating system that best supports their individual workflow. The key here is to consider this as early as possible, ideally at the start of the project, so that, for example, you can simply work directly with Vulkan instead of DirectX, thereby enabling seamless collaboration on Linux and minimizing friction as much as possible.
In my view, there’s currently only one major roadblock: console ports. If you want to release on consoles as well, you’ll likely need at least one Windows system for now. But thanks to dual-boot, you don’t have to use it every day 😉