Setting up Unity3D on openSUSE

While setting up the unity editor on common Debian based systems is fairly trivial ignoring some minor quirks with Linux compatibility, setting it up on openSUSE Tumbleweed has been a little bit less straight forward and requires a few workarround steps to get it properly working.

I initally tried running the editor using a Flathub unity package but faced the usual issues you get from running the program in a sandbox, primarily having user binaries like /usr/bin/gh not passed through as well as some minor styling issues that stem from my desktop setup. In the end, I decided it would be easier to just install it directly on the host and that’s what I ended up doing.

Installing Unity Hub

Even though it took me a while to find it because I read over it in the docs, Unity does offer a rpm package primarily targeted at RHEL and CentOS. That isn’t a problem for me though and it already means we don’t need to convert deb packages. Converting the repository setup to zypper results in

sudo zypper addrepo -f https://hub.unity3d.com/linux/repos/rpm/stable unityhub 

After that we can install the unity hub with

sudo zypper install unityhub

This will usually suffice to get the unity hub running in my experience, but if you haven’t installed 7zip already, you should do that since seemingly unity uses it to unpackage editor installations.

Getting the Editor Running

Initially, opening the editor failed because it was missing a few libraries it needs to run, primarily libxml2–2. Because this versioned library is not present in any of the official repos, I installed it from a home repository I deemed trustworthy (home.alvistack) using

sudo opi libxml2-2 

Of course you can also create an account for the Open Build Infrastructure and fork / reference the package into your own home repository if you prefer that.

Additionally you might need to install libopenssl1_1, which you can install from the KDE3 repository with

sudo opi libopenssl1_1

After that the editor should be starting without many issues and should generally work, but you might notice that web requests to unity services are failing. This is because unity hard references the certificate paths for debian based systems. To fix this, you can simply create a symlink

sudo mkdir -p /etc/ssl/certs
sudo ln -s /etc/ssl/ca-bundle.pem /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

The modification of the file endings isn’t really an issue since both are in the pem format anyways. After this — at least for me — everything was working how I would expect it to work.

Issues with Dropdowns

Initially I also faced issues with Dropdowns not opening properly and being extremly slow, this was mostly likely because of the bug mentioned here in the Unity Discussions, which also references a bugfix in gtk3 that came out just a few days prior to me starting the installation. Seeing how recent the bugfix was I just updated my distribution (zypper dup) which pulled the fixed version and actually fixed the issue, after that I just accepted that it was likely this gtk bug and moved on.

Closing Remarks

Even though I didn’t face any additional issues yet, in the case I would I’d probably look first at the arch wikipage for Unity3D, as a lot of things mentioned there may also be adapted to openSUSE or at least present a good starting point. Also unity has a small section in their editor docs for linux editor issues that doesn’t seem to get updated often, but it may be still worth a visit should you face any issues.