Dolphin, the popular free open-source GameCube and Wii emulator, announced new major 2407 release earlier this month. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu via either Flatpak or Ubuntu PPA.

It’s been 8 years since the latest major 5.0 release series. The Nintendo video game console emulator finally announced Dolphin 2407, which uses new date-based versioning scheme. 2407 means version released in July of 2024.

According to the announcement, it adopts a rolling release cycle, and will roll out new releases every few months. The development releases will have sub-numbers, for example, Dolphin 2407-144 means dev build with 144 commits after 2407. And, hotfix releases will have the addition of a suffix, so it can be Dolphin 2407a.

The new major release also introduced new app icon! The new logo looks fat and modern than the old one created in 2013.

New icon also has dark, red, and not knowing what to called (the center one) variations. Though I don’t see any of them in the app windows.

The announcement told about the new version system, new icons, but sadly nothing about new features and changes. Also, there’s no changelog in the source tarball. If you want to know about the change, then I think you need to dig into the commits page.

How to Install Dolphin Emulator 2407 in Ubuntu

The software website provides official packages for Windows, macOS, and Android, but sadly NOT package for Linux.

Besides building from source, there are 2 unofficial choices for Ubuntu users:

• Flatpak package – runs in sandbox environment, and can be installed in most Linux.
• Ubuntu PPA – contains native .deb package.

Option 1: Install Dolphin Emulator Flatpak package

The Flatpak package runs in sandbox, but can be installed in most Linux, including Debian, Fedora, Arch, RHEL, all current Ubuntu releases, and even old Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04.

For Ubuntu, first press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up a terminal window, then run command to install Flatpak daemon package:

sudo apt install flatpak

NOTE: the old Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 need to add this PPA first before being able to install the daemon

Then, run command to add Flathub repository:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Finally, install the package via command:

flatpak install flathub org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu

After installation, search for and launch it from start menu or Gnome overview. If you don’t see the app icon, try log out and back in.

Option 2: Install Dolphin Emulator 2407 from Ubuntu PPA

For those who prefer the native .deb package format, I’ve built the new release into this unofficial PPA, which so far supports Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 on amd64 (AMD/Intel) and arm64 (e.g., Raspberry Pi) platforms.

NOTE 1: The PPA package is NOT tested! The emulator app window starts in my laptop, but I don’t have game ROMs to try out if it’s working good.

NOTE 2: Current 2 Ubuntu LTS releases miss some dependency libraries. I included them in the source of dolphin-emu (under “Externals sub-folder”), and built into bundle. Due to these external libraries, the source tarball (in PPA page) is not identical to the one in Github project page.

1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up a terminal window. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/dolphin-emu

Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.

2. If you’re following this tutorial in Linux Mint, then you need to run command to manually refresh package cache:

sudo apt update

3. Finally, install the .deb package of the emulator by running command:

sudo apt install dolphin-emu

NOTE: If the app does NOT launch after installation, try to install the qt6-wayland and qt6-qpa-plugins via command:

sudo apt install qt6-wayland qt6-qpa-plugins

Uninstall Dolphin Emulator

To uninstall the Flatpak package, open terminal and run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu

Also run flatpak uninstall --unused to clear useless run-time libraries.

To uninstall the .deb package, use command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove dolphin-emu dolphin-emu-data

Also remove the Ubuntu PPA by running command:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/dolphin-emu

And, Linux Mint users need to run sudo apt update afterwards to refresh package cache.