Installation
Most programs are available for Debian or RPM based distros.
While installing the programs in this article is mostly a matter of selecting them from your distribution’s repository, that will not keep you on the bleeding edge nor will it handle plug-ins or template libraries. If you want the bleeding edge, the best way is to learn Git as this is the most common way developers keep a public development repository.
Let us see what is going on. LibreCAD v2.0 is available in the repositories of major distributions and there are also libraries with parts and templates available. These are on GitHub and, since it handles DXF files, much more are available across the web, especially in spare parts catalogues – many spare parts manufacturers deliver CAD drawings for their products. Other modules are not in development.
FreeCAD currently has a Debian package version 0.16. The newest version is 0.17 and is only available as a tar or to clone down from GitHub. On GitHub you can also find many modules and ready parts for extending your original install.
SolveSpace has version 2.1 on Debian. Their GitHub repository has version 2.3 as a release binary package and the source is available (of course). There are no modules to extend SolveSpace and no dedicated spare parts catalogues.
OpenSCAD has version 2015.03-1 available on Ubuntu 16.04 – the version has not been bumped on their webpage since then. To find modules simply use Git to make the MCAD library a submodule of OpenSCAD.
QCADPro is available as a script file that installs QCAD on your system, while the community edition is available in source code only, on GitHub. There is a gears module available on GitHub written in JavaScript.