On 06/28/2018 10:00 AM, MichaelAtOz wrote:

I guess that would include the distributions that are available
on OBS with automatic builds. That is currently

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• OpenSUSE

In that order because I'm running Debian/Testing on my notebook
so it's easier to help with stranger issues.

Ubuntu just gets the benefit of being based on Debian. For
some reason unknown to me Mint tends to produce random issues
that do not seem to happen in their base Debian/Ubuntu versions.

With Fedora/OpenSUSE, I'm not so sure about the order, I believe
Fedora has more active maintainers in general for 3D printing
stuff, but there's not much obvious feedback from distributions
so it's hard to tell.

Other than that, I know Arch has an active maintainer who
tends to be on our IRC, so if you are happy with their different
approach that could be a good choice too. If the goal is to
just install and go it might not be the first distribution
to select. They do have awesome documentation which is useful
even when using some other distro.

We do have now Snap packages and AppImages, but I would not
consider those as good as native distribution packages (yet?).

Yes, please! The points above are just my personal opinion
based on our github issue history and my experience.

So if you are an OpenSCAD maintainer or happy user with any
other distribution, please share you experience.

I don't think we need any negative reports of "what other
people are using" for this specific question.

ciao,
Torsten.

Just my 2 cents, I've been running OpenSCAD on Mint for years without
problems. I was Ubuntu before that. My experience with other
distributions pre-dates my use of OpenSCAD.

G. Wade

On Thu, 28 Jun 2018 11:13:02 +0200
Torsten Paul Torsten.Paul@gmx.de wrote:

--
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by
definition, not smart enough to debug it.    -- Brian W. Kernighan

On 28 June 2018 at 18:00, MichaelAtOz oz.at.michael@gmail.com wrote:

Ubuntu Mate 18.04 here, working well.
https://ubuntu-mate.org/

You'll also want:

Arduino IDE for 8-bit Marlin/Repetier
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

Atom and PlatformIO for 32-bit Marlin
https://platformio.org/get-started/ide?install=atom

RRF is all web interface config, Smoothie is text file config, so no
extra software needed for those.

Slic3r Dev (get the AppImage)
https://dl.slic3r.org/dev/linux/

Cura (get the AppImage)
https://ultimaker.com/en/products/ultimaker-cura-software

Pronterface (just run the pronterface.py script)
https://github.com/kliment/Printrun

Meshlab if you tinker with STLs
sudo apt update; sudo apt install meshlab

On 29 June 2018 at 09:23, Jamie Bainbridge jamie.bainbridge@gmail.com wrote:

Sorry I should have elaborated on this better. I'm a user running
Torsten's nightly builds, so just:

wget -qO - http://files.openscad.org/OBS-Repository-Key.pub | sudo apt-key add -

echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/t-paul/xUbuntu_18.04/
./' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openscad.list

sudo apt update

sudo apt install openscad-nightly

Then run "openscad-nightly" to launch.

I don't know if that appears in the GUI menus with an icon, I use the
dmenu_run launcher so I just run the "openscad-nightly" command
directly. If there is no icon, you can easily make one with the menu
editor if you want.

I don't have any experience with the dev environment. The incredible
ease of constantly updated nightly binaries (thanks Torsten!) negates
the need for me to build from source.

Sorry, can't make comparisons, but the Mate(Ubuntu(Debian)) version is good performer on older machines, worth a look. A very tidy collection of features/apps. OpenSCAD runs well in the 64bit stand alone app format.
Rob
Cheers, RobW

On 16 July 2018 8:27:09 pm AEST, MichaelAtOz oz.at.michael@gmail.com wrote:

I think there were problems reported with OpenSCAD running under the Ubuntu
Unity desktop environment, due to the way that Unity messes with the
application's menu bar. Unity caused similar problems with a lot of
applications, but Unity is now deprecated.

I have no problems running OpenSCAD under Gnome. I would expect OpenSCAD to
work fine under almost any desktop environment.

On 16 July 2018 at 06:27, MichaelAtOz oz.at.michael@gmail.com wrote:

On 16 July 2018 at 20:27, MichaelAtOz oz.at.michael@gmail.com wrote:

The largest difference will be your enjoyment/frustration with using
the desktop environment for finding and running other applications or
managing files.

Each DE has a slightly different philosophy with different
configuration ability.

You can run most desktop environments as a live USB to try them. You
could install OpenSCAD on that live environment, just the installation
will not persist because it's a live system (though it's possible to
create a persistent live environment too).

If you're coming from Windows then probably the easiest will be MATE
or Cinnamon or XFCE. These are available pre-made with Ubuntu MATE and
Linux Mint.