Rhino on Linux?

Hi all, I’ve been running Rhino 7 on two debian-based linux computers and I just wanted to make a quick update. One box runs the latest Gnome and one runs i3. Both with Debian Staging.

On Gnome it’s … well it’s pretty much flawless. Even the weird issues with sidebars and views not updating I mention below are minimal if present at all. This is a really good basis for comparison with the other machine which runs i3 (with a Gnome backend).

On i3:

  • You have to manually regenerate viewports by moving in them. This to my knowledge is a common Wine / Rhino thing of old.
  • The sidebar display issues are kinda annoying - sometimes they just won’t display or update.
  • Grasshopper works perfectly except once the double-click search has been brought up you have to navigate it with arrows rather than the mouse, as any mouse movement makes the menu disappear.
  • Pretty persistently when you’re switching between monitors, something in the interaction with Rhino and i3 will cause focus to pull back to the workspace that Rhino is on. For example if I open Rhino in workspace 1, start grasshopper and move it to workspace 2 unless I manually switch with the keyboard to wks2, each time I get to the edge of wks1 the mouse snaps back to the center.
  • Every once in a while it will just stop accepting text input. I’ve figured out a workaround that seems to always work (manually switch to another workspace and back). But it’s annoying.
    (Edited to emphasize - these are problems due to i3. Xfce will do better and Gnome will do REALLY well. If you’re not using i3 you probably won’t consistently have the last 5 problems I listed here.)

All in all I’d say I’m about 10% slower due to the fact that running Rhino through wine and i3 can be kinda finicky. And the performance is probably a bit slower than it would be on the beast of a machine I’ve just built.
File access on remote computers on the network can be slow - but that’s due to wine.

So unless you’re hopelessly committed to an annoying affectation like tiling window managers and just COUNTING the days until Wayland gets NVidia support so you can switch to Sway, use Gnome. I had a previous machine running it under XFCE, which worked okay. But Gnome is definitely better for user experience.

In terms of other plugins and rendering - VRay installs perfectly under stock wine. The Interactive viewport render mode won’t work but the rest of it is great. I have CUDA configured on the linux side and it is able to use CUDA (does VRay implement CUDA separately?). And the renders are very fast actually!

Other creative programs you need to run a studio:

  • They’ve done excellent work they’ve done getting Affinity running on Linux through an emulator, and I have that going.

  • If you want to stay FOSS GIMP 3.0 now has non-destructive editing.

  • I don’t think Scribus is a great InDesign replacement but it works and the other common Creative Cloud programs are easily replaced with InkScape, Blender, DaVinci Resolve, Natron, ffmpeg, etc.

  • As for our 3d print slicers, Chitubox has a linux native version which works phenomenally. And PreForm runs through wine without any special configuration.

  • You may have heard that Microsoft is now harvesting your data from Word. LibreOffice has always been a great Office replacement.

  • And finally, in terms of Grasshopper Plugin development, I haven’t tried to work with it yet but I have VSCodium running and was able to download the .vsix files for the Rhino and Grasshopper templates, so I look forward to being able to develop start to finish here without needing my old Visual Studio installation.

So - I thought I’d share my notes in the interest of our shared effort. This has made me even more committed to Rhino on Linux as a long-term possibility.

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