Fortnite is finally headed to Linux. Epic says it's rebuilding its Easy Anti-Cheat software into a new version called EAC Linux v2, and once that works with enough Linux distributions, Fortnite will ship on Linux through the Epic Games Launcher. There's no date yet; Epic engineering director Rick Deist told The Verge the company doesn't have a timeline.
Anti-cheat has been the holdup for years. In 2022, Tim Sweeney said Epic didn't have "confidence that we'd be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations." The new approach leans on signed kernels, signed kernel modules, and secure boot with attestation, and Epic is asking distro maintainers to get their signing keys onto a list it plans to eventually open source. Fortnite pilots it first, and other developers get it after. The Steam Deck doesn't support the features EAC v2 needs, though Epic says it's talking with Valve.
The launcher itself is the other half of the news. A redesigned Epic Games Launcher is out in preview today on Windows, Mac, and, for the first time, Linux. Epic's own blog post says "we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that's way faster and more responsive than the current one." Martin Keely, who runs the Epic Games Store, told The Verge that "we definitely had agents write and review all of the code," while the team supervised the process.
That lands days after Sweeney told staff Epic has a "huge pivot underway" toward AI-assisted development. The old launcher stays available, and Epic says the full switch happens once the new one is stable and at feature parity. Shipping the launcher, the front door to the whole store, is about as public a test of that bet as Epic could pick.
— via The Verge