Best Simulation Games for Ubuntu – Trucks, Farms, Factories & Flight

The whole planet, rebuilt from satellite data, with real weather and real air traffic laid over the top of it.

Nothing else here gives you the same sense of scale. You can take a small plane out of your own local airport, fly for twenty minutes and land somewhere you have actually been. The 2024 version also gives you work to do, including firefighting, crop dusting and search and rescue, so there is a reason to go up beyond sightseeing. On Ubuntu it needs patience, and it is the heaviest game on this page by a wide margin.

Note: ProtonDB rates this Silver overall, which means it runs with problems. The recent reports are noticeably better than the old ones and it currently trends at Gold, so check a current Proton version before you judge it.

A flight simulator with a proper Linux version, built around how air actually moves over a wing.

X-Plane is the one to pick if you want to learn to fly rather than sightsee. It works out the forces on the aircraft as you go, so a heavy landing or a dead engine behaves the way an instructor would tell you it should. There is a real Linux build, which means no compatibility layer and nothing to configure. The scenery is plainer than the Microsoft one. The flying is better.

Drive a lorry across Europe, take the jobs you like the look of, and slowly build a haulage company.

This is the quiet one people keep going back to. You pick up a load in Rotterdam, put some music on, and forty minutes later you are pulling into Milan. It has a native Linux build, it still gets new countries years after release, and it runs comfortably on hardware that struggles with most of this page. If you have never played a simulation game, start here.

The same driving moved to the United States, with long empty roads in place of motorway traffic.

It shares its engine with the European game and still feels different to drive. The distances are longer, the roads are emptier and the scenery changes more slowly, which makes it the more relaxing of the two. New states arrive regularly and the map is now big enough to plan a week of driving around. Pick this one for space and the European one for variety.

Heavy trucks, deep mud and cold rivers, where getting there at all is the whole job.

SnowRunner is not a racing game and never pretends to be. You are moving a load across ground that does not want you to, in low gear, watching your wheels sink. Winching yourself out of a bog you have been stuck in for ten minutes is satisfying in a way that finishing first never is. Proton runs it at Platinum and it asks a fair bit of a graphics card.

Drive real locomotives from inside the cab, with every lever and gauge doing what it should.

Most train games put you behind a floating camera. This one puts you in the cab and makes you run the thing: build the pressure, watch the gauges, brake early because you are moving two thousand tonnes. You get paid per delivery and you can wreck the train by getting it wrong. It is hands-on and unlike anything else here.

Build a museum, send your staff out to find the exhibits, and keep the visitors interested once they arrive.

The clever part is that you have to go and get your own exhibits. Staff head off on expeditions, come back with something, and you decide where it goes and what it needs around it to be worth seeing. It is funny without being silly, it has a real Linux build, and a session ends when you decide it does rather than when a timer runs out.

Run a dinosaur park where the animals have firm opinions about the fences you built for them.

The tension here is that the exhibits can get out. You are balancing what visitors want to see against what is safe to keep, and those two answers are rarely the same. The 2025 version puts far more work into how the animals behave, so a badly planned enclosure fails for reasons you can watch happening. It is the best looking game on this page and it wants a decent graphics card.

Build theme parks and water parks, down to the path a single visitor decides to take.

You can play this two ways and both work. Either you run it as a business and worry about queues and ticket prices, or you ignore all of that and spend an evening making one perfect ride. The water parks are the new part and they change the layout problem completely, because slides need height and height needs space. Big parks lean on the processor rather than the graphics card.

Start with nothing in a run-down town and build an underground business up from the ground.

This was the surprise hit of 2025 and it earned it. You start out doing everything yourself, badly, then slowly work out how to hire people and set up a supply chain so the work runs without you. Watching a system you built start running on its own is the whole appeal. It plays well alone and better with friends.

Note: This one is still in early access, so expect missing features and regular changes.

Order the stock, price it, fill the shelves and work the till in your own small shop.

There is nothing clever about this and that is exactly why it works. Boxes arrive, you put things on shelves, customers queue, you scan. Then you notice you priced the milk too high and nobody is buying it, and suddenly you are thinking about margins at eleven at night. It has grown a long way past its rough first version and now has staff, a bigger shop and far more to keep track of.

Run a trading card shop, open the boxes yourself, and decide what to sell and what to keep.

This one found something the other shop games do not have: the boxes are fun to open. You can sell a sealed box for a safe profit or open it yourself and hope, which turns restocking into a small decision every single time. There is a card game inside the card shop as well. It is a lot more game than it looks from the outside.

Note: This one is still in early access, so expect missing features and regular changes.

Land on an alien world and build a factory around yourself, in first person, at whatever scale you like.

Most factory games are played from above. This one puts you down on the floor, so a belt you routed badly is something you have to walk past every time. That changes how people build: they end up making their factories tidy because they have to live in them. It left early access in 2024 as a finished game and runs at Platinum. Late-game factories are where the frame rate starts to hurt.

Build rockets out of parts, launch them, and find out precisely which bit you got wrong.

Kerbal teaches you how orbits really work by letting you fail at it, cheerfully. Your first ten rockets fall over. Then one reaches orbit and you understand something you did not understand an hour earlier. It has a native Linux build, runs on almost anything, and the modding community around it is still busy more than a decade on. The sequel was abandoned, so stay with this one.

Cut up derelict spacecraft in zero gravity, sort the valuable parts, and try not to cause an explosion.

You are a salvage worker with a cutting tool and a quota. Every ship is a physical puzzle: work out the order to take it apart in, or vent a fuel line straight into your own face. Moving around in zero gravity feels excellent, and the story running underneath it about company debt is sharper than it needed to be. Each ship is its own job, so sessions stay short.

A farm, a small town full of people worth getting to know, and a finished 1.0 release that only just landed.

This left early access in August 2026 after two years of steady work, and the finished version is generous. You farm, you fish, you mine and you get to know everybody in town, and it never once pushes you along. The art is the real draw: it is hand drawn in a style closer to old animation than pixel art, and it looks lovely in motion. There is a proper Linux build.

Real machinery, real brands, and fields that need doing properly rather than quickly.

This is farming as a job rather than a cosy hobby. You drive licensed machinery, work out what to plant where, and hire help when the harvest is bigger than you are. The current edition added rice and much better ground that deforms under the wheels as you work it. If spending an hour ploughing sounds good rather than dull, this is your game.

Inherit a run-down farm and turn it into whatever you want across four in-game seasons.

Ten years on it is still the one everybody recommends, and the free updates keep arriving. What makes it last is that farming is only the start: there are caves to explore, a town full of people to get to know, and enough going on that two players will end up with completely different farms. Native Linux, tiny download, runs on anything you own.

Point a pressure washer at something filthy and make it clean, one patch at a time.

It should not work and it completely does. The dirt comes off in visible strips, a meter tells you how much is left, and stopping halfway turns out to be oddly hard. The new version adds a proper base to come back to and split screen for two players, which was the main thing missing. It runs at Platinum and is happy on a modest laptop.

Buy tired houses, knock them about, fix them up properly and sell them on.

The first game was a cleaning game with some decorating attached to it. The sequel is a proper building game: you can move walls, change the layout and put up a house from nothing when you just want to build. The satisfying part is the same as it always was, taking a room that looks terrible and slowly making it not. There is no time limit anywhere in it.

A large open map, a goat, and absolutely nothing in it that stays where you put it.

This is a comedy game wearing a simulator’s name, and it earns its place here because it is the best thing on the page for switching your brain off. You are a goat in a small open world, everything reacts to you, and the game keeps handing you daft things to try. It runs at Platinum and holds an Overwhelmingly Positive rating from more than fifteen thousand players. Four of you can play at once.