Fortnite is coming to Linux so we may soon be able to play it and other games like Apex Legends on Steam Deck and Steam Machine

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. This is why many games that use Easy Anti-Cheat aren’t playable on Steam Machine or Steam Deck. The post even names Valve specifically, saying the team will “continue its open line of communication” to support Steam hardware devices “to the maximum extent technically possible”.

Part of the reason Linux has been a difficult problem for anti-cheat makers to solve is the platform’s open nature, meaning certain – required – system-level protections are not guaranteed. On Windows, you can ask users to enable features like TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, which create that secure environment once hardware requirements are met.

While some of that work can be done on Linux, it requires the interest and participation of distro maintainers. Easy Anti-Cheat plans to use Linux features such as signed kernel, signed kernel modules, and secure boot with attestation to achieve that goal. “These requirements build on work that distribution maintainers already do,” explains Epic, “and the more distributions that meet these requirements by default, the fewer players will need to change their setup to play.” The goal is to “bring the level of protection much closer to par with Windows”.

There is no timeline for any of this at present, but Easy Anti-Cheat will test the announced plans in Fortnite first before making them available to other developers. In other words, if Fortnite gets a release date on Linux, you’ll know the work has paid off and we’re closer than ever to achieving anti-cheat parity between Windows and Linux.