Its name is both a Linux reference and a play on the title of the original city-building game, SimCity, and it was released under the GNU General Public License v2.

The simulation considers population, employment, basic water management and ecology, goods (availability and production), raw materials (ore, steel, coal), services (education, health, fire protection, leisures), energy (electricity and charcoal, coal with finite reserves, solar and wind power) and other constraints such as finance, pollution and transports.

Lincity can be won in two ways: reaching sustainable development, or evacuating the entire population with spacecraft.

[2] Lincity was originally designed for Linux, but was ported later to Microsoft Windows, BeOS, OS/2, AmigaOS 4, and other operating systems.

As Lincity does software rendering it requires no 3D graphics card and also has very low demands on other computing resources, e.g. much memory or a fast processor.