Cross-platform dependency-agnostic packaging for Linux

[edolnx]

Greetings Simplify3D -

I use Simplify3D on Windows all the time, but would love to use it in Linux as well. Unfortunately, I am never able to get the application to work on my Linux systems. It appears to be an issue of library compatibility (my systems are too new apparently), and it's very hard to debug. So, I wanted to suggest an alternative way of shipping the Linux install: AppImage [ http://appimage.org/ ] or an alternative like Flatpak [ http://flatpak.org/ ] instead. I've been a Linux user for a while, and I know we are a small audience and the difficulties of porting, but my hope is that these frameworks will make your lives easier (and means you shouldn't have to worry about quirks about the various distributions out there). I've used a few desktop applications based on AppImage recently, and it works great on all of my systems. Hope this is useful!

[probono]

Hello, AppImage developer here.

I think it should be entirely doable to produce an AppImage of Simplify3D that would run on most common Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE, and others. If there is interest in this, just let me know how I could help.

AppImages are already used in the Linux 3D printing world by the Ultimaker Cura and FreeCAD projects, for example.

[fiekemike]

Would be great to have a working version on Linux. I run OpenSuse Leap. After the login screen S3D replies that it cannot connect to the activation server and shuts down. However when I start S3D on a virtual Win10 server on the same host pc, it does connect. Of course I can run S3D on the virtual machine all the time, but that is not very efficient. I've been in contact with the S3D helpdesk to trace back the cause of the problem, but their conclusion was finally that OpenSuse has 'strayed away from compatibility'... That's where the 'help' ended. Unfortunately S3D has no command line switches which could help debugging, as far as I know.

I would be extremely happy if S3D would produce a version which is just working!!!

[paulliu]

I've created a flatpak-builder json file for S3D.
Please refer https://github.com/grandpaul/Simplify3D-flatpak
I'm using Debian.

Image: http://imgur.com/a/sI2eR