[lug] sketchup

[Simos]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2018 14:36:07 -0700
Stephen Queen <svqueen at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been struggling to learn how to use freecad. It has a very steep
> learning curve, and is awkward for me. I feel like it is holding me back
> from doing projects I would really like to complete. I see a lot of people
> use sketchup. This is a proprietary program (ugh) for windows. After some
> checking, I see that some people have successfully loaded and designed with
> it under linux using playonlinux and wine.
> 
>  Has anyone on this list done this?
> If so what are your impressions?
> Should I keep struggling with freecad, or bite (byte?) the bullet and load
> sketchup?
> 
> Thanks for your opinions,
> Steve

Hi Steve,

I've been compiling & using Wine for many years now (mainly for games but also
for some Windows applications) so I know my way around it pretty well. I signed
up and downloaded the trial version of SketchUp Pro and installed it in a clean
dedicated Wine prefix. It's a bit tricky to install (needs at least .net 4.5.2
& the Visual C++ 2014 runtime, which I installed with winetricks) but I got it
installed and running on my Debian 9 system running Wine development (3.0 RC5)
without much hassle. Here's a screenshot of it running with a couple of basic
shapes I created:

https://s18.postimg.org/94rkvkmah/sketchup.png

It's a bit flaky but from the little testing I did it seems to work well enough.
Menus, buttons, the camera, shapes, drawing, materials, saving & loading, etc.
all work OK. I wouldn't do any production work on it but for learning the tool
you should be fine.

FYI, the current version available from the vendor is now SketchUp Pro 2018,
which the Wine AppDB does not yet have:

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=1815

Ratings for previous SketchUp versions (and older versions of Wine) vary from
bronze to silver which means it works but will have glitches. Wine itself is
also a rolling target so a newer Wine version might screw up a previously
working setup but in general it gets better. You may also want to try older
versions of SketchUp such as 2017 if you can find them.

Hope this helps,

Simos