Get installed
For some apps, actually installing it on to your system is a struggle.
FreeCAD is a fairly standard Linux application, and it’s in a continuous state of development. For this reason, we decided to install it by downloading the AppImage archive from the FreeCAD website. This got us the latest official release, but as always with AppImage, there were a few integration issues. For example, we had to set an environment variable to get the UI scaling to match the rest of our system.
Installing CadQuery isn’t as easy as it should be. Following the official instructions, you have to install a working Python 3 environment, which is fair enough. However, you then have to follow a series of lengthy procedures to install Pip and Anaconda along with some Python dependencies just to install CadQuery and the GUI editor, CQ Editor. It’s worth noting that CQ Editor is just one choice of front-end for CadQuery. The flexibility of those options is welcome, but it requires some patience and expertise to get it all installed and working together.
Salome was another program for which we had to hunt down quite a few Python dependencies before we could get it running. The Ubuntu download didn’t work on our version of the distro and we ended up running the generic Linux version instead. We set an environment variable at launch to scale the UI.
OpenSCAD hasn’t had a major update recently and we were happy to install it from the official Ubuntu repository using the standard package management tools. SolveSpace is in a similar position, and we installed it as a standard application using the package management system of Ubuntu.