In this article, we’ll learn to install League of Legends on Ubuntu. League of Legends is massive. Even after 10 years of its release, it boasts 115 million active monthly players (2021) and 8 million concurrent players which arguably makes it the most popular PC game ever made.
And today with gaming on Linux becoming popular day by day, so popular in fact that around 70% of top Steam games support Linux (native or Proton), you would think that League of Legends would have some sort of support for Linux.
You however will be sorely mistaken. Riot Games, the publisher of League of Legends has followed Adobe in its unwillingness to release a native build for Linux and support the open-source environment citing reasons like lack of funds and low demand.
Thankfully, however, there are many workarounds built by the community which does what a massive corporation can’t make the game run on Linux.
Steps to install League of Legends on Linux
Today we will be looking at one such method to install League of Legends on Linux.
Step 1: Install Wine
Wine which stands for “Wine is not an emulator” is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on Linux. Installing it is pretty easy as it is a very popular application and can be found in the official repositories of almost all distributions. Apart from Wine, we also have to install winetricks which is a helper script for wine.
Debian/Mint/Ubuntu – apt package manager
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 && sudo apt update
sudo apt install wine winetricks
Arch/Manjaro – pacman package manager
sudo pacman -S wine winetricks
Redhat/Fedora – dnf package manager
dnf install wine wine-alsa wine-core wine-desktop wine-pulseaudio
cd "${HOME}/Downloads"
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
chmod +x winetricks
sudo cp winetricks /usr/bin/
Step 2: Install lol-wine
Base WINE itself isn’t enough to install League of Legends and run it on Linux. We need to download some league-specific patches. This patch is built by Manuel Reimer and is available on Github.
Debian/Mint/Ubuntu
wget https://m-reimer.de/wine-lol/debian/wine-lol-glibc_2.33-1_i386.deb
wget https://m-reimer.de/wine-lol/debian/wine-lol_5.6-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i wine-lol-glibc_2.33-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i wine-lol_5.6-1_i386.deb
Arch/Manjaro
sudo yay -S wine-lol-glibc wine-lol
On any other distribution you can simply build it from source.
wget https://m-reimer.de/wine-lol/debian/wine-lol_5.6-1_i386.deb
wget https://m-reimer.de/wine-lol/debian/wine-lol-glibc_2.33-1_i386.deb
mkdir -p deb/glibc deb/wine/
ar x wine-lol-glibc_2.33-1_i386.deb --output deb/glibc/
ar x wine-lol_5.6-1_i386.deb --output deb/wine/
tar -xf deb/glibc/data.tar.xz
tar -xf deb/wine/data.tar.xz
sudo cp -r opt/wine-lol/ /opt/
NOTE: It is recommended to visit the official wine-lol website and check for the latest wine-lol and wine-lol-glibc packages. Accordingly change the link in wget commands and the file names in the ar commands. To get the link, right-click on the package and click “Open in new tab”. Currently the latest version of wine-lol is 5.6-1 and wine-lol-glibc is 2.33-1.
Step 3: Installing a helper program
Now we are going to install a script written by Timofey Titovets(Nefelim4ag). This script which can be found on their Github will automate the process of installing League and make it infinitely easier.
To download and install the helper script, execute the following
git clone https://github.com/kyechou/leagueoflegends.git
cd leagueoflegends
make install
Step 4: Installing league
Now that everything is up and running, we can actually start installing League of Legends with the use of our helper program. To do a fresh install, run
leagueoflegends install
When executed for the first time, the helper script will create some wine configurations. After some time you will be prompted with choosing a region. Write the preferred region and hit enter.
Now you can hit “Install” and it will work just as it does on Windows. You can launch the game through any application launcher/start menu or by executing:
leagueoflegends launch
To completely uninstall the game, run:
leagueoflegends uninstall
Conclusion
Now you know how to install League on your Linux device. However this might soon change as Riot is protecting new games like Valorant with kernel based anti-cheat engines which will render any Wine based option useless. As stated on wine-lol ‘s website , “If you are playing on Linux, it is strongly recommended to not spend any money on skins or other in-game items! Your money may be lost as soon as Wine support breaks.”
So have fun while you still can!