Fortnite is coming to Linux on the Epic Games Launcher

That's a slap to the original developers.

Not really, it could also be mostly the same dev team behind it. And it's still lacks just as many features as the first :p

It feels a bit strange to outright call it vibecoded in the announcement? Even among AI coding supporters, I thought vibecoding had a generally negative connotation? Maybe my definition of it is lacking, but vibecoding is essentially taking all of the human process and understanding out and letting the LLM do all of the work, review, and maintenance of the code base and not having a human overseeing production beyond telling the LLM what they are hoping the final product will be? I'm not a fan of most AI usage due to ethical and environmental concerns, so it might just be my lack of up to date knowledge on the field culturally speaking.

Here at least, it feels like its an outright admittance of not giving a single fuck about the product, while also shitting on the prior product that you were supposed to stand behind (which was pretty ass, to be completely honest, sorry OG devs). Maybe that original team got mostly axed in the recent layoffs and now they literally dont have anyone left with the skillset to make a storefront? The whole press release just had an odd, dismissive of your own talent sort of tone to it, which really puts me even further off ever using any of their products. It's just... odd, from a corporate PR perspective.

(Not that i was in the target market for this in the first place. While im practically exclusively using Linux these days, im certainly not a fortnite player or someone who wants to support Tim Sweeney in any way.)

I’m far from an Epic hater, and I think devs in general are underappreciated (especially these days), but even I have to admit that the current Epic launcher is sooooo slooooowwwwww. Everything about it is heavy. Using it feels like swimming.

They update it fairly regularly, and each time I’m hopeful that it’ll be smoother and more optimized, but it never happens. I’ll sing Heroic’s praises up and down for being an open source alternative, but it’s also noteworthy in that it genuinely gives an improved experience over the native app. It’s way snappier and has (IMO) better UX. It’s what their main launcher should be.

So, it feels weird to for me to welcome an explicitly vibecoded new version of EGS, but, honestly, the current launcher is bad enough that I can’t deny my excitement at the prospect of literally ANY rewrite.

Also it’s nice to see another nod towards eventual Linux support, though I’m still very much in the “I’ll believe it when I see it” camp. Until then (and likely even after), we have the amazing Heroic to fill that gap.