Epic Says It Vibe Coded Its New Games Launcher

The Epic Games Launcher is available on Linux for the first time, as part of a new Preview build that Epic says it vibe coded to be faster and more responsive than the current launcher. The Preview can be downloaded today on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and Epic admits this first release is light on features, though it does point out that the new launcher has a shopping cart. The vibe coding line isn’t a throwaway joke either, as Epic is leaning hard into the fact that it’s embracing AI across its development pipeline. It made that clear at State of Unreal 2026, with coding assistants and asset generation heading into Unreal Engine.

According to Epic, the new launcher has faster cold starts, quicker navigation between the library and the store, and puts less load on your system while running in the background. It also supports Epic Parties, the voice chat feature that works across Fortnite, the Epic Games Store, and the Epic Games mobile app. Each game now gets a dedicated page showing its status, activity, details, and play controls, and you can connect your other PC libraries to see everything you own in one place. The library supports collections, grid and list views, a customizable top bar for your favorite games and apps, and search and filtering as you type. A download manager shows download, read, and write speeds alongside active, queued, scheduled, and failed downloads.

On Linux, the Preview officially supports Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or newer, Fedora 43 or newer, and Debian 12 or newer, while on macOS it only runs on Apple Silicon Macs. Your account, purchased and installed games, cloud saves, and progress all carry over to the Preview and to the full release, and there’s a Send Feedback button in the launcher for reporting issues. Epic does recommend that competitive players and developers working on live projects stay on the current launcher for now. When Epic shared its 2025 results in February, its roadmap had voice chat and game-independent parties scheduled for the second quarter and cross-platform library support for fall. Epic Parties ended up arriving in September, and the connected libraries are now part of the Preview.

Fortnite isn’t on Linux yet, but Epic says it’s coming through the launcher once a rebuilt version of Easy Anti-Cheat is working with enough distro maintainers. The new EAC Linux v2 doesn’t use a kernel module, instead relying on a systemd service that runs only while a protected game is active, and it requires features like Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 on the player’s system. Epic plans to pilot it in Fortnite first before making it available to other developers so they can bring their games to Linux players. For now, Epic says the Steam Deck doesn’t support the required features, though the company is talking with Valve about supporting it later.