Installing Unity3D on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
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When installing Unity3D 2020 or later on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS even your newly created project will contain errors and Unity will suggest safe mode when you try to open it.
To solve it begin by entering safe mode.
The console will present you with the error No usable version of libssl was found. At least in theory it sounds like something that’s simple to fix. Install a version of libssl that Unity finds useful and you should be good to go.
But what is a usable version of libssl? And how do you install it? Preferably without breaking anything that might depend on the existing libssl.
Lib SSL
The problem occurs because Ubuntu comes with OpenSSL 3.0 installed while Unity uses .Net 5 which will only try to find SSL versions 1.0 or 1.1.
The solution is simply to install version 1 of OpenSSL. Download the file libssl1.0.0_1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.10_amd64.deb from http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/o/openssl1.0/ and install it using dpkg.
sudo dpkg -i libssl1.0.0_1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.10_amd64.deb
This will install the old version alongside the current one, so existing software depending on a newer version of libssl will still be able to use it. And once this is done Unity3D should run without problems.
Alternative workaround
A bit surprisingly Unity 2019 works fine and in my opinion it’s one of the most stable and performant Unity versions ever. So if you don’t need the latest and greatest of features it might be a viable solution to stay on the latest 2019 version until the team at Unity finds a solution to this.
