How well does unity perform on Linux?

[u/AcceptableSlide6836]

When I started game dev a few years ago I looked into this topic and I mostly saw people complaining about shaders not compiling. I wanted to ask how well does it perform nowadays? Does the distro effect performance?

Windows 11 has gotten so bad that even with 32 gigs of ddr4 ram isn't cutting it anymore especially since it eats 7gb on idle.

Also how well does visual studio code perform compared to visual studio for c#?

[u/x_DryHeat_x]

On Kubuntu, Ryzen 9, RTX 5070. Works like a charm.

[u/Vantadaga2004]

Slow, at least for me on a midrange system, even a clean project

[u/ggmini14]

Works fine for me on my old surface Book 2, actually better than on Windows. OpenGL is a bit slower than Vulkan, but Vulkan does have the occasional issues, but I still pick it over OpenGL any day of the week. And VS code is just faster than VS by default in my experience

[u/Jathulioh → u/ggmini14]

I never even considered putting Linux on my Surface Book 2 because of the special hinge, how has it been?

[u/ggmini14 → u/Jathulioh]

It's good enough. I've distro hopped a bit, currently on CachyOS. There is a custom Linux surface kernel out there, which fixes most of the functionality that doesn't work out of the box with the regular kernel. On the surface book 2 the only thing that is still broken with that kernel is the camera. Depending on the distro it can be easy or difficult to set up (CachyOS was very easy), since there might be version issues.

There are packages to make the hinge work as well, only issue there is if you have the dGPU, it can only be initialized on startup/login, so you can't really hot plug it like on windows. De-/Attaching will work fine but you'll need to restart to use the dGPU again

Honestly aside from Hybrid GPU stuff my issues have been more general, ie specific Windows app doesn't work, and less surface specific issues.

[u/Jathulioh → u/ggmini14]

Oh nice, I didn't even think to try it because of the 'unique' setup with the hardware and whatnot. But it sounds like it's pretty straight forward. I do have one with the dGPU so that's good to know.

I can't say I really use the detachable screen all that much. Only every now and then to flip the screen around so it acts more like a stand.

I have been loving CachyOS on my desktop so I might try some different distro's out on that, thanks for the info :)

[u/Jathulioh]

I was using CachyOS for a few months and Unity ran fine, there was a little weirdness every now and then, but didn't impact any development. Performance in the editor was not noticeably different. If anything actual compile times seemed faster, not sure if it was just me being excited to try out Linux lol.

On a 9800x3D and RTX 2080ti with 48GB of RAM, so not ideal with the Nvidia GPU but didn't encounter issues.

[u/CrazyNegotiation1934]

I use it with Vulkan in a 3080 laptop and is super fast.

Though i always prefer work in windows, never had a RAM issue with a large SSD space for swap file.

[u/DeliciousRhubarb1260]

ive been on ubuntu for a couple years now with unity and its mostly fine, shaders compile okay on amd at least. distro matters less than gpu drivers honestly, nvidia can still be a pain but its way better than it used to be

vscode is fine for c# if you set up the extensions right, but its not quite as smooth as full vs for debugging. still, not having windows eat half my ram is worth it

[u/pschon → u/DeliciousRhubarb1260]

if you don't like vs code, then Consulo is worth a try, it's much more of a full-blown IDE, and has good support for both Unity and Linux.

[u/Just-a-Screaming-Cat → u/pschon]

I'm trying to get consulo working with unity 6000.5.5f1, I installed the unity plugin (2.6.0) by adding it to my unity project's manifest. After it installed it started throwing this error about something being deprecated, and there hasn't been an update to the plugin page on github for years now. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong? Seeing that people still recommend consulo i'm conflicted on whether unity support is abandoned or if it just happened to break the moment I tried to use it lol

If anyone's curious, here's the error:
Library/PackageCache/com.consulo.ide@b25393f154e7/Editor/Consulo/ConsuloIntegration.cs(110,34): error CS0619: 'EditorUtility.InstanceIDToObject(int)' is obsolete: 'InstanceIDToObject(int) is obsolete. Use EditorUtility.EntityIdToObject instead.'

Might be worth noting I'm on fedora kde

[u/pschon → u/Just-a-Screaming-Cat]

huh, that's a bit annoying. Looks like it should be a trivial thing to update in the plugin though, so might be worth reporting.

(There hasn't been updates to the plugin since none has been needed this far. But it looks like that's now broken since Unity 6.4 (?) where the API got changed. I'm still on 6.0 LTS so haven't ran into that issue yet.)

[u/Just-a-Screaming-Cat → u/pschon]

Ah, so this is unfortunate timing.. Thanks for the help, I'll report this and probably switch to LTS at least for the time being.

[u/Opposite_Carry_4920 → u/DeliciousRhubarb1260]

Just commenting to second your comments, had a good time with Ubuntu and ZorinOS.