How to Setup and Run Unreal Engine 5 on Ubuntu 22.04

Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games. It’s a powerful game engine that provides high-fidelity graphics and realistic physics, is used by AAA game developers, and has been adopted by many independent developers.

Unreal Engine has been used to create some of the most popular games of all time, including Fortnite, Gears of War, and Borderlands.

As stated in their Linux Development Requirements, to develop on Linux you’ll need a computer running Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04, while their recommended system is 22.04.

In this tutorial, we’ll set up and run Unreal Engine 5 on Ubuntu 22.04. We’ll download the Unreal Engine 5 archive, extract it, run Unreal Engine, and try out one of the demo projects to make sure it works.

The process is easy and straightforward; it will just take a bit longer since the .zip file is about 20GB, which we’ll have to download and then extract.

Table of Contents

1. Prerequisites
2. Download Unreal Engine 5 for Linux
3. Extract the Unreal Engine 5 Zip File
4. Run Unreal Engine 5
5. Running a Demo Project
6. Conclusion

Prerequisites

As stated in their Linux Development Requirements page, and on their download page, to develop using Unreal Engine 5 you’ll need:

• A computer running Ubuntu 22.04 (recommended) or Ubuntu 20.04
• ~60 GB of free disk space (the archive takes about 20GB, and ~60GB when extracted)
• A GPU with a minimum of 8GB of memory

Download Unreal Engine 5 for Linux

To download Unreal Engine 5 for Linux, go to the official download page. From there, you can just click the download button and wait for it to finish.

Extract the Unreal Engine 5 Zip File

You can unzip the .zip file to any directory you’d like.

In my case, I’ll create a directory in my /home directory.

mkdir '/home/edxd/Unreal Engine 5'

And I’ll extract the archive into that directory:

unzip -d '/home/edxd/Unreal Engine 5' Linux_Unreal_Engine_5.0.3.zip

This will take a while.

Run Unreal Engine 5

Now that the archive is extracted to run Unreal Engine 5, navigate to the directory where it’s extracted, and in /Engine/Binaries/Linux so in my case, it will be:

cd '/home/edxd/Unreal Engine 5/Engine/Binaries/Linux'

And run:

./UnrealEditor

Unreal Enditor is Loading At some point, you may be alerted to update your Nvidia drivers to the latest version to prevent any potential issues.

Finally, Unreal Editor should be running.

Unreal Editor Project Browser Running a Demo Project

I’ll run a demo project to make sure it works. In my case, it will be First Person.

Watch this video on YouTube

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we downloaded, unzipped, and ran Unreal Engine 5 on an Ubuntu 22.04 computer, and we also ran a demo project. I hope this was useful to you. If you encounter any issues, feel free to leave a comment, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.