How stable is Unity+Rider on Linux?

Hello World!

I am thinking of finally switching fully to Linux - specifically Fedora, because I can’t stand Ubuntu’s snaps and UI inconsistentsies -. But, I am wondering how stable are the Unity editor and Rider on Linux? Is it a plug-and-play experience, or a dependency hell? How often does it crash? (preferably, I would like answers from people who used them extinsivley as opposed to just trying them once).

Super stable for me, I have been using it for work for many years. The 2019 releases were fiddly when re-arranging editor panels/views. It doesn’t crash more than Mac/Windows. I’ve stayed on supported distros, ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 and now test-driving 2022.04 which also seems to work fine with recent Unity releases.

I’ve been building primarily for Android, some WebGL and native…

I forgot to point out that I’m also using Rider, again no issues here, for GIT, I use a cross-platform client called SmartGit.

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Unity : Mostly stable. I use it every day also on Fedora with KDE. It sometimes crashes but this is rare. Most of the times for me it crashes at launch, like once out of 15 launches. I just start it again and then it works. I don’t think this a Linux specific issue. It’s not like Unity never ever crashes on Windows.

Only once I encountered a Linux specific issue on Unity (a crash when drag and dropping). I reported it and they fixed it.

Also, Unity is MUCH faster on Linux than on Windows, on the same hardware. Compile and build time are much shorter.

Unity works mostly out of the box on Linux. No need to install dependencies. Just make sure your window manager has a compositor and that it is enabled. Most 3D apps (not just Unity) need compositing to work correctly. But most Linux distribution have that by default anyway.

My only complaint about Unity on Linux is the installation. The devs used to distribute Unity as a Appimage and it just worked great. Just download the file, double click it, click the Install button and you’re done. They switched to a system package for some unknown reason and now Unity is needlessly complicated to install. You have to open a terminal, become root, type commands, edit system config files and all of it is different depending on the distribution you’re using. And they call it a quality of life change? Also, the desktop integration breaks every time the package is updated, because quality of life I guess.

Rider : Very stable. It works out of the box (unlike VS Code), it has plenty of useful features and it never crashes.

The only problem with Rider is that the team don’t fix the bugs. Problems that users have been complaining about for years have never been fixed and, most likely, never will be. This isn’t specific to Linux it’s the same on all platforms. My advise is to pay for a one year license of Rider so you can keep using it after that and then never pay for it again. There is no need to update if there are no bug fixes.

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I use that combination for a few months now (on Kubuntu 23.04) and it’s been quite stable for me. The only minor annoyance i frequently experience is that that the cursor very often switches to the resize type inside the unity window and only switches back when explicitly hovering a text field or something else that forces a cursor type change; but i think this may have been addressed in 2022 (haven’t tested it yet). Rider sometimes seems to lose its internal connection to the editor, but i had that happen on windows too, and can’t say if it’s worse on linux, and as it’s not critical for coding or debugging (i guess mainly just to scan assets or mimic unity’s play/stop buttons) it doesn’t affect anything relevant for me.
As for crashes, i have not had any that related to unity-on-linux (only a few general unity bugs that my collegues experienced on windows too), it feels quite stable.
It does seem to have a hard requirement on having blender installed though (as a system package, snaps or similar wouldn’t work for me), as else unity didn’t seem to be able to import most (any?) 3d formats (atleast for me, tried on two different systems).

Using Unity daily on Arch Linux for the last year or two.

For the editor I recommend using at least 2021.3 LTS or newer. 2020 was usable but the 2021 seems much more stable. Also technically 2021 is the first version where the Linux editor (not the same as targeting Linux) is fully supported. Linux editor in 2020 and earlier was considered preview/experimental. So if you know try to report bugs for Linux editor in 2020 LTS, there is a chance that they will be rejected as a nonsupported version even tough 2020 LTS in general is still supported.

If you are using Using unity on a distro that isn’t officially supported be prepared that any attempts to report a bug to go like:

  • I have a bug here is a test project for reproducing it
  • Can’t repeat it → your distro isn’t supported go away
  • I just repeated the problem in a VM of officially supported distro
  • VMs aren’t supported → go away
  • Install the Ubuntu on spare hard drive problem still repeats
  • Ok, we will take look

Anecdotal experience of project opening/import and also the build process going much faster than my colleges using Windows.

Crashes during typical usage are rare, maybe once a month. Only exception was when I was experimenting with GPU compute, that was often causing crashes for whole desktop not just UNITY. But it probably tells more about state of linux GPU driver architecture not so much UNITY. Don’t remember crashes when making regular shaders for materials.

Your results might vary depending on the kind of projects you are making since different people use different subsets of unity functionality. And things that are showstoppers for some, might be insignificant for others. I am using 2d pixelart stuff, builtin render pipeline and mono instead of il2cpp, the blender stuff mentioned by Flavelius doesn’t affect me.

As for the installation process and Unity Hub expect some messing around to get it working for the first time. Three potentially biggest problems:

  • the hub insnstallation process itself. As ChiwTheNeko the old Appimage based one more or less just worked on most distros. Now that they switched to having their own repos with native deb/rpm packges things are a bit messier. If you are on the exact officially supported distro versions, it should be fine. If you are using something else (even if it’s based on the same thing as officially supported ones ) the results may vary between: happens to work, dependency hell and impossible. Since you are considering Fedora, the repo and packages intened for Centos might work. I am on neither deb or rpm based distro so I am still using the Appimage based hub. Half a year ago they did some kind of magic and launching the old 2.x based hub Appimage launches the new 3.4 hub. I don’t think it’s officially supported since the link to appimage has been removed from official download page, but you can still find it in forum announcements. There Is also version of UnityHub on flathub, never had success with that.

  • Second potential issue is login process. Last time I checked login process involves hub opening a link in a browser, logging in a browser and then the browser trying to open special unityhub:// link to communicate back with the hub. Even with correct executable manually being associated with unityhub:// protocol, it didn’t seem to quite work. But I am using an unsupported environment so take it with grain of salt. Although some other forum posts suggest that there might have been problems even for officially supported OS versions. In my case seemed like Firefox was blocking the magic unityhub:// link redirect/popup. Inspecting the browser console to find out the link it was trying to open and manually passing it to unity hub executable on terminal seemed to work. Not a major inconvenience day to day as you don’t have to login too often, but if you lack the technical understanding to debug what goes wrong it might be a problem.

  • Third big recent problem that might affect you depending on distro you are using is the OpenSSL API incompatibility. Unity depends on an old OpenSSL version. Newer distros (including latest version of Ubuntu) ship with never version which isn’t compatible. Fedora is usually quite close to bleeding edge as well, so you will likely have that issue as well. Although seems like Fedora has an official version of old OpenSSL for compatibility reasons openssl1.1 - Fedora Packages , so it shouldn’t be too difficult to install it.

Can’t comment too much about rider. I am still sticking to VScode until my current setup breaks, not sure If I would be able to get it working on fresh install. Will likely try switching to Rider once VScode integration completely breaks.

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I am using Linux Mint, and surprisingly is stable and works wonderful!

Thank you everybody, I have already since moved to Fedora and my experience with Unity and Rider on it was nice thus far except for some small issues.

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Glad to hear it’s working out for you. To throw my hat in the ring, I’ve been using the Unity Editor on Linux and Mac for a long time now, and noticed since ~2020+ releases it’s more stable on Linux than Mac.

+1 for Rider integration, Rider truly is a fantastic IDE!

I’ve been unable to have a usable experience with 2022.3.5f and 4 different distros so far, moving around windows results in them become giant and taking up the whole screen, making it impossible to place the window where I am intending.

Not being able to make a proper layout is frustrating, not to mention the occasional crashes when moving a window.

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I thought I would give you guys some thoughts about my experience. In my last post I mentioned that I faced some small issues, but these issues kept increasing to the point that they were no longer small, and the experience of using Unity was frustrating and horrible. For starters, no proper fractional scaling (This is a Linux wide issue, and not Unity’s mistake per se). Second, for some reason most of the time Rider doesn’t automatically recompile Unity assemblies or the assemblies get locked. I can go on forever about the nuisances I faced, but that’s not the point of my post. The point is Unity as a proprietary piece of software was not made with the way open-source OSes work in mind. If it works well for you then I am happy to hear that, but for me it was nothing like I’ve been told. I am now back on Windows BTW.

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