Looking for a digital pet application for your computer? Here’s one that works natively in Linux Desktop.

It’s Shijima, a cross-platform shimeji simulation, desktop pets app works on any device, including Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, and Nintendo Wii.

The app is free to use but sadly NOT open-sourced so far. The PC/laptop edition uses Qt6 for its user interface. And so far, it’s at the first alpha stage that works for Linux only on KDE and GNOME (both X11 and Wayland) desktops.

Shijima-Qt provides portable executable file and AppImage for Linux. No installation is required. Just run to launch the app window, then, import shimeji mascots by drag’n’dropping the zip/rar/7z archive into app window. Finally, click to add your pets onto desktop and play with them!

How to Install Shijima-Qt in Ubuntu & other Linux

The Shijima-Qt packages for Linux, Windows, and macOS are available to download in Github releases page via link below:

For Linux, select download the release-linux-x86_64.zip that works on modern Intel/AMD CPUs.

Then, decompress and finally run the “Shijima-Qt-x86_64.AppImage” from extracted folder to launch the app. To run it, either right-click and select “Run” (after enabled “Executable as Program” in its Properties dialog), or right-click on blank area in the folder that contains the executable files, select “Open in Terminal” and finally run command below in pop-up terminal window.

./Shijima-Qt-x86_64.AppImage

NOTE 1: Ubuntu since 22.04 does NOT support AppImage out-of-the-box, run sudo apt install libfuse2 in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) first to enable.

NOTE 2: Don’t know why, but first time launching the app will ask to log out and back in to apply something to make it work.

NOTE 3: The app itself so far does not include any mascots, you need to search (e.g., <character name> shimeji) and download one from the web first. And, here are some Murder Drones shimeji by @PolarSummit on X.

If you don’t like the AppImage, you may run the shijima-qt file in that folder instead to launch the app. It however requires Qt6 >= 6.7 that’s NOT available in Ubuntu repositories until 25.04.

Even in Ubuntu 25.04 (still in development stage), you need to run command to install the required run-time libraries:

sudo apt install libqt6widgets6 libqt6multimedia6 libqt6core6t64

And, finally run command from that folder to launch the executable file:

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb ./shijima-qt