Bazzite is a great general use/gaming linux OS / distro…

But in particular, getting UE5 set up and working on it, as a game development engine, is actually very, very not fun.

It is much easier to set up Godot or even O3DE, or Bevy. Those are all fully open source, and also totally free to use, no liscensing payments for making a game with them.

Uningine is a seemingly little known, closed source, but much more generally linux compatible game engine, that imo rivals UE5 in terms of features and capabilities, and also Flax Engine exists, is uh, ‘source available’.

Both of those have something like a ‘pay x% of your game revenue per time period after it exceeds $y per time period’ model, similarish to Unity… and they also have better, more broad native linux support than UE5.

…

But uh, why aren’t UE5 snd Bazzite a good fit?

Well, for starters, UE5 officially supports Rocky and Redhat linux.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engine

You may note that Bazzite is not, nor is based on either of those.

Bazzite is basically a customized version of Fedora.

Further, Bazzite’s whole paradigm is that of a sealed off base OS, and then everything else is run or installed in atomized containers, use flatpaks as much as possible.

Generally, this is great for stability, gaming, and being able to rapidly update and improve the OS…

But when you are running a game engine for development, especially on linux, you will often need to download and install all of its specifically required dependencies, and Bazzite, by design, is geared toward you not doing that.

It wants you to use distrobox, podman, distroshelf, etc, to set up essentially a containerized, near approximate of a more standard linux setup within Bazzite, and then do any real development work within that… and this can lead to various weird, esoteric problems, that there isn’t really anybody with guides or documentation on how to handle, because setting up a game dev engine in this way is extremely uncommon.

(Especially so if you want to actually do some kind of customized build of the engine from source, because you need or want some existing, additional, but non standard capabilities)

(Though of course that doesn’t apply to UE5, they are not open source)

This makes it more complicated to set up a properly working game engine, especially when native linux compatibility is uh, advertised, but not well documented, updated, or fully working in practice.

…

UE5 is also very, very much just offering ‘linux support’ as an after thought.

UE5 + linux + containerized, atomized linux = you’re gonna have a bad time.

If you wanna go with Bazzite, and a totally free and open source game engine, I’d suggest Godot, Bevy and/or O3DE, roughly in that order of increasing difficulty of getting them to actually work properly.

You could also maybe consider Raylib/RayEngine, though I don’t have much experience with it.