My experience using Unity3D on Manjaro i3

Introduction

Last year Unity Technologies have announced the Linux support for Unity3D. Currently, the company grants support for Ubuntu and CentOS distros (You can see more details in this post). However, I'm currently a Manjaro i3 user, and, in this post, I'm briefly describing my experience using Unity3D in this distro.

Background

I'm a Linux user for almost 7 years. I see myself as an intermediate user since I can solve some problems without much difficulty (yes, I'm talking about the NVidia drivers). Last year a friend of mine presented the Manjaro i3 to me. I found out the i3 to be an amazing window manager, and I already knew that Manjaro is an excellent OS.

This year I started my master's at USP-ICMC (Universidade de São Paulo - Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação), and I joined the Games Research Group. Since Unity3D is the default game engine of our group, I started to learn it. Although there is no official support for Manjaro, I decided to use the engine in this distro. Moreover, I'm a novice game developer.

My experience

I have been using the 2019 LTS version of Unity3D for just over two months. Despite being a short time, I think I have interesting things to share. In general, Unity3D has good support for Linux, but I did find some problems.

The first annoying thing is: since Unity3D is compiled as an AppImage, it is not possible to run the engine directly on dmenu. To open the Unity3D from dmenu, I had to create a bin file. It wasn't difficult, but the need to do this is annoying.

Second, Unity3D (in Majaro i3) is quite slow to load new assets, and to update them. It is even slower to compile the C# scripts. But, maybe, I think it's slow because I'm used to not using such a heavy editor.

Third, and the most annoying problem is the GUI bug:

Fourth, my account was not recognized by the editor after I logged in to the UnityHub. When I needed to download some assets from the Asset Store, I couldn't. I had to log in again to the Asset Store in the editor (I saw this solution online, but I lost the link and didn't find). However, it seems that this problem was solved this week.

Fifth, the real big problem of using Unity3D on Manjaro i3 is the crashes. This problem doesn't happen so frequently. Hardly ever, while I was searching for some solution or while I was watching a tutorial video, the editor crashed (maybe because the Unity3D consumes too much memory). The crashes are more frequent when in the build, but when the builds turned out successful, they work well.

Conclusion

I don't know if all those problems happen on the officially supported distros or if they happen only because I'm using Manjaro i3 (probably some of them). Although those problems, it's been nice to develop games with Unity3D. Since the games I develop aren't too big, I don't build games frequently, and the build is usually fast, so I think I can live with this problem.

And that is it. Thanks for reading!

Downloading Unity3D on Manjaro

There are two ways of using Unity3D on Manjaro, or you download the official AppImage, or you download from AUR (currently experimental).