SuperTuxKart, the free open-source arcade racing game, announced the release candidate for the next 1.5 release few days ago.

It’s been more than half a year since the last Beta release. And, the new RC release includes primarily bug-fixes and minor new features.

The RC release added new egg hunts on three tracks. They are Black Forest, Gran Paradisio Island and The Old Mine. And, it introduced Supersampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA) support, allowing to render game resolution higher than your maximum display, though it’s extremely heavy that may lower frame rate.

It also added spotlight support and significant updates to the Vulkan renderer, though OpenGL remains the default renderer.

Other changes include group karts in classes, and displays all tracks in screen without scrolling to view them, as well as animation improvements and graphical enhancements to the overworld.

Kart in Classes

Compare to the last 1.4 stable, the release also features benchmark support. As you see in the second screenshot, it added new “Performance tests” option in “Graphics” setting page.

By clicking on it will do an automatic racing, then print the test results on screen with ability to save as file. Which, is useful for comparing the performance on different hardware, or tuning graphics settings for better performance.

Besides that, it added new “Display” setting page, allowing to configure screen resolution options that were previously available in the Graphics page. And, it add options to configure camera, including field of view (FOV), distance, angle, and choose either split horizontally or vertically in split-screen multiplayer layout.

Other changes include:

• New XR-4R3N4, Hole Drop, and Oasis soccer fields.
• New music for Las Dunas Arena and Las Dunas Soccer.
• Add blog announcement system in Online screen.
• Add ability to select favorite karts, tracks, arenas.
• Five new skin variants for Cartoon, and a new Desert skin variant for Classic.
• Enable new higher LoD and shadows settings
• For more, see the CHANGELOG.

How to Install SuperTuxKart 1.5 (RC)

The game offers official packages for Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android. Along with the source tarball, they are available to download at the link below:

For Linux, select download “SuperTuxKart-1.5-xxx-linux-xxx.tar.gz”, according to your CPU platform (run uname -m command to tell).

After downloaded the tarball, just decompress it, and run the run_game.sh file from the extracted folder to start the game.

If you want to add the game into launcher (app grid or overview search result), then open Text Editor, create an empty document, then paste the following lines:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=SuperTuxKart 1.5
Icon=supertuxkart
GenericName=A 3D open-source kart racing game
Exec=/home/ji/MyApps/SuperTuxKart-git20250527-linux-x86_64/run_game.sh
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=false
Type=Application
Categories=Game;ArcadeGame;
Keywords=tux;game;race;
PrefersNonDefaultGPU=true

Here you need to replace the game PATH that’s in bold, according to where you saved the folder to. In my case, I created “MyApps” folder in user home, and put all portable apps/games folders into there.

After that, save the file as “supertuxkart.desktop” into .local/share/applications directory. NOTE: .local is hidden by default, press Ctrl+H in file chooser dialog to view/hide it.

If everything goes well, you’ll be able to launch the game from start menu (or Gnome overview) few moments later. Note for missing app icon, just grab one from the web, name it as supertuxkart (.PNG or .SVG), finally put it into .local/share/icons directory.

In my case, I have both SuperTuxKart 1.4 installed from system repository, and v1.5 RC via the Linux tarball. So, I have 2 game icons in launcher, but with different names.

Uninstall:

To uninstall the kart racing game installed via the steps above, simply delete the game folder using file manager.

Then, also delete the supertuxkart.desktop file from .local/share/applications, and delete the icons (if any) from .local/share/icons directory.