Can I program in Unreal from Debian, or another Linux?

Over the years, the developers of the different Linux distributions such as Debian they have facilitated their projects to make them accessible to a greater number of users. In addition, it tries to improve compatibility when playing on the PC and thus be on par with Windows and get performance from engines such as Unreal.

It is precisely for all this that many users use some Linux distribution at this time as an alternative or main system. All of this regardless of their prior knowledge of the operating system, something that can be extended to popular distros such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Debian, among many others. In parallel and due to the growing market for the use of PC games on Linux, many users are wondering about the possibility of developing their leisure projects on the open source system.

As it happens for example in Windows, these have the possibility of making use of different platforms and applications for it. One of the most effective and useful solutions for creating games is to use the popular Unreal engine. This is used to carry out different 3D projects related to rendering, architecture, simulation, etc. Therefore, and thanks to everything that it offers us, many Debian users might wonder to what extent they can develop games or other content with Unreal Engine.

A priori, the use of this component in Windows is quite common in all kinds of projects, as has been seen in recent years. First of all, we must bear in mind that the programming language on which all this is based is the well-known C++.

How to program in Unreal with a Debian-based PC

Every time we can run a greater number of video game titles on Linux distributions, including, of course, Debian. This is something that we can do in different ways, although the goal of many is for all games to run natively. Also, the usual of these open source systems such as Debian will want to develop their projects directly in Unreal.

Therefore, in case you want to use the aforementioned Unreal engine, it is worth knowing that it is possible. Although it is true that those responsible for it do not offer a binary executable to start the platform, they offer us an alternative solution. Specifically, we refer to the fact that those responsible for this game engine offer us the source code of the platform. This means that all those interested in developing their projects with Unreal have the possibility of compile that code in Debian and get to work.

It is true that the process is not as simple, at least in the first instance, as it happens in the Microsoft operating system, Windows. But this is something that has become commonplace on many occasions for those who want to get the most out of Linux distributions. Of course, being based on the C++ programming language, we can also generate our own code in any editor like Geany and then bring it to the mentioned game engine.