The first Unity 2019.1 beta is out with Vulkan improvements, Linux editor improvements and more

The people over at Unity have put out the first beta for the first major release of the year and there's tons of new and improved bits for game devs and Linux gamers.

Firstly, they're depreciating support for 32bit builds of games on Linux, so if you're one of the 0.17% you really will need to go 64bit eventually.

To make it easy, here's a list of Linux-specific changes:

• Linux: Fix SetResolution was not able to resize a maximized window (1099286, 1115927)
• Linux: Fixed GPU skinning on Vulkan when running on Linux (1117706)
• Linux: Deprecate Linux x86 and Universal targets. These will be removed in future Unity versions.
• GI: Enable GPU lightmapper (preview) on macOS and Linux
• Editor: Fixed "Open by File Extension" not working properly on Linux and MacOS (1090145)
• Editor: Fixed a bug where Linux Editor inspector didn't activate items with space bar input (1061975)
• Editor: Linux: Using the "Verify Save Assets" option should now properly work in the Linux Editor (957853)
• Editor: Remove duplicate for Rider path discovery on Linux
• Editor: Update the progress bar window on Linux to use a consistent size (1100653)
• Linux: Fix for Editor windows repaint bug (Ubuntu 16.04) (1107716)
• Linux: Fixed issue where tabs were incorrectly processed twice. (1080441)
• Linux: Fixed touchpad scrolling being too sensitive in the Linux Editor (1073152)
• Linux: Linux and Mac will now launch the BugReport crash handler when a SIGABRT is sent. (1074324)
• Linux: Linux: Crash in UnityEngine.Input.GetJoystickNames when controllers are removed & reconnected (1080508)
• Linux: Resolve an issue where double-clicking on Linux Standalone Players did not function in Nautilus. (1047075)

It's good to see a healthy dose of Linux issues fixed, the better Unity games are (and the Editor) on Linux, the better it is for everyone of course.

For Vulkan, this Unity release is going to see a decent number of improvements there too. There's now initial sparse texture support for Vulkan, native rendering plugin support for Vulkan, GraphicsFences are now available on Vulkan (OpenGL too for that one), async readback when using Vulkan was fixed and so on. See the full changelog here.

Additionally, Unity also recently acquired Vivox, a 3D positional voice technology which includes cross-platform voice and text for integrated communication. Sadly, Vivox is one that doesn't support Linux and I know of at least two Linux ports held back by it, so with this news there may be hope they will add in Linux support since Unity supports Linux too. It would certainly make sense to have services and products Unity run work across the platforms they themselves support.