The day has finally arrived! The Linux developers at Unity have shipped their first build of the Linux Unity editor that is from a unified codebase.



From the release announcement:

Quote This is an important milestone!

Not only is this the first beta build for Unity 5.5, but the first Linux editor build shipped from a unified codebase with mainline Unity. That may not sound exciting, but it has a lot of exciting implications. It means that, instead of starting with vanilla Unity and piling thousands of custom changes on top, all of our changes now live in the Unity mainline, where they can be constantly punished by our automated test suites across all of our platforms, and where all of our developers across Unity can easily fix, refactor, and extend Linux editor code alongside everything else.



What's in this new Unity editor version?

- 5.5.0b1

- Unity now uses the OpenGL core rendering backend. This means that your development environment must support OpenGL core profile 3.2 or later.

- Experimental iOS project deployment support

- Fix crash on entering play mode in VR-enabled projects

- Fix moving undocked editor windows by dragging the titlebar



The Linux Unity developers are also still hard at work on integrating SDL with Unity:



This is really, really great news and I'm really pleased the Unity developers were able to reach this milestone. Hopefully this will make Linux a more enticing option to develop on if Unity on Linux is progressing so well.