Running Unreal on Linux

Author

flip phillips (fxpppr)

Modified

July 2, 2026

[WIP] Work In Progress

Basic Stuff

UE is available on Linux, but it has lots of idiosyncrasies (well, come on, it just locks up a lot, just like in Windows!).

Where it lives

On the MAGIC machines, it lives in /opt/UE. NOTE that UE is a symlink to the actual version, which is something like UE_5.6. If you want to run a specific version, you can cd into that directory and run the binary.

Running the Editor

To run the editor, you use UnrealEditor. You have to launch it from the directory itself because of occasional linking issues.1 So, you would do something like:

cd /opt/UE/Engine/Binaries/Linux
./UnrealEditor

You can make an alias in your shell to make this easier

Put this in your .bashrc or .zshrc:

alias ue='cd /opt/UE/Engine/Binaries/Linux && ./UnrealEditor'

Then you can just type ue in your terminal to launch the editor.

Footnotes

  1. Note, there are ways to set up LD_LIBRARY_PATH to avoid this, but it’s not worth the effort.↩︎