Epic Games is officially working on bringing its battle royale shooter Fortnite to Linux. The announcement was tucked away at the bottom of Epic's widely mocked blog post revealing the new, "vibe-coded" Epic Games Store, which is also coming to Linux.
At the time, Epic explained it's going to be working with Linux distro maintainers on a set of security requirements needed to run Fortnite. Distros - short for distributions - are operating system variants of Linux, each with its own goals and prioritised system operations. Valve's SteamOS, for instance, is based on Arch Linux. Because of the many discrepancies between Linux distros, each would need to implement Epic's security requirements individually if they want Fortnite to run on their operating system. Fortnite will arrive on Linux via the EGS launcher, but only if a "critical mass of distro maintainers" is reached. Epic didn't specify numbers.
This is big news for several reasons. For one, the move would likely make Fortnite playable on SteamOS PCs and handhelds, including Steam Machine and Steam Deck. Furthermore, even if that "critical mass" is never reached, Epic says its work will be available to other developers interested in bringing their games to Linux.
Perhaps the biggest reason this is a big deal, however, has to do with Easy Anti-Cheat, the Epic-owned anti-cheat service used in Fortnite and dozens of other games - including Dead by Daylight , Rocket League , Apex Legends , and even Elden Ring . While Easy Anti-Cheat does support Linux, including for some of the games just mentioned, many developers choose not to enable it , simply because its "Linux implementation couldn't offer the same level of protection as our Windows implementation," as Epic explained in a separate blog post .
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