I feel like Unity has been pretty stable… Are we getting close to an official release that will be on the download page or a ppa?
I’d like to know that too.
There are still some issues that need to be fixed, and I don’t think they’ll have an official release until they finish the installer. I do agree that it’s getting pretty stable, though. Fingers crossed!
I’m really happy seeing that the installer is improving. Linux needs top game engines. The more software supported, the more users. I think it would be a big mistake if Unity Team gave the Linux version up. I see many users are interested in that. So are companies. Nvidia, AMD and Intel seem to take care of good drivers for Linux with Vulkan API. I think it will be a good future for Linux.
Well, I can’t know for sure wether they are improving the installer, but due to the way the Unity installer works on other platforms - where you get to choose exactly which parts to install -, I think it is necessary for it to be present on Linux as well. There may be other ways for them to add that functionality (or just include everything in the package), though I don’t know what their plans are.
Maybe they could just split it up into a whole bunch of packages and not worry about that? Like have the core Unity Editor be one package, then have the standard assets as another, and then anything else that comes with that initial installer just be seperate packages you could choose to download if you wanted them.
That seems like the more Linux-ie way of doing it
I don’t think the installer is the biggest problem here. I personally would start writing a proper installer when the product itself is considered release-worthy.
Unity3D on Linux may be stable, but I think there are still bugs left to fix to be able to promise stability on a business level. Especially when it comes to big projects that use every part of the engine. I haven’t even tried baking shadows in this version yet.
Why you are looking for installer ? Why not just use repository to install the App for Ubuntu ? Installers are just for poorly designed Os like operating-system-which-name-i-will-not-say.
Of course they could offer a repository for Ubuntu, I would like that.
That doesn’t solve the installation for other distributions, though. I like the way they solved it with a .sh file, don’t need a special installer when I’m using a not directly supported distribution. But some basic dependency resolving would be nice.
I explained why. Having multiple packages would eliminate that problem though.
It is nice to dream of a day when you’ll just be able to type
sudo apt-get unity-editor
into your terminal and just get Unity
As far as installation on other distros goes, I feel like they’ll only “officially” support Ubuntu/Debian based distros and give instructions for that “platform agnostic” installer on the side for other distros like they do now with the beta. If they are supporting everyone though, I’m not sure if .rpm based distros have something like Ubuntu’s repos, but if they do, maybe they’ll get on those too. And of course Arch based distros will just have it like 20 seconds after it officially comes out on the AUR, because thats just how they roll.