Hello,
I’m writing this tutorial for those of you who want to try different Unity versions in GNU/Linux. I’m using currently Debian Stretch but installation should be “platform-agnostic”.
First of all, Unity 3D for GNU/Linux is in beta state, so bugs may be present. You can download official installers from their forum:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-on-linux-release-notes-and-known-issues.350256/
I recommend downloading versions tagged with f (final) and not with b (beta). In our case, we could consider, for example, installing versions 5.6.3f1 and 2017-2-0f1.
In download html we have 2 versions to download: “Debian package” and “Platform-Agnostic Self-Extracting Shell Script”. If we want more than one version installed we should consider the latter.
Once downloaded, we take the next steps:
chmod u+x unity-editor-installer-.sh
sudo ./unity-editor-installer-.sh -o /opt/unity/
replacing with unity’s version.
After we have installed both versions, we will have to create launchers in /var/share/applications/
cd /var/share/applications
touch unity-desktop-.desktop
cp /opt/unity//unity-editor.desktop .
And edit the file to set the correct path. For example, for 2017.2.0f1 version, my unity-editor-2017.2.0f1.desktop file looks like this:
[Desktop Entry]
Version=2017.2.0f1
Name=Unity 2017.2.0f1
Exec=/opt/unity/unity-editor-2017.2.0f1/Editor/Unity %F
Exec=/opt/unity/unity-editor-2017.2.0f1/Editor/Unity %U
Icon=unity-editor-icon
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Development;IDE;Application;
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/com.unity3d.kharma;