Hi All, it’s been a bit quiet around here. But I just wanted to report some problems and their solutions I had encountered using Rhino on Linux with Wine.
Somewhere along the way running Wine in the i3 windower on the X11 compositor in Linux, the ability to right-click on components in the Grasshopper canvas stopped working. Even hovering over a component wouldn’t bring up the information pop-up.
You may remember from prior posts that I also had an issue with the viewports not regenerating properly at the end of a command. This I could live with, as I found little workarounds. But the right click issue made Grasshopper basically impossible to use, and that’s where I do most of my work in Rhino.
This started happening over the summer. So before fixing it I had to get a big deadline out of the way. (I just submitted my Dossier for Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure a couple weeks ago! So that’s off for peer review then six months of institutional tennis before I get word. Wish me luck, and back to the show…)
Once that was out of the way I made the switch to windower Sway, which runs on the more modern Wayland compositor. That immediately fixed the Grasshopper issues. But the viewport regeneration issue remained. So while getting something else up and running on Sway / Wayland I also had installed XWayland, which allows X11 programs to run inside Wayland.
And wouldn’t you know, now my Rhino is 100% fine.
So I can report - using Wine and Rhino 7, as long as you have Wayland and XWayland, everything should hopefully run smoothly. My experience says X11 has significant issues which impact the usability of Rhino / Wine, and while Wayland alone fixes some of those issues with regards to Grasshopper - for full functionality get Rhino, Wine, Wayland, and XWayland.
Wayland and proprietary NVidia drivers don’t like each other, but there are tutorials on how to still enable Wayland to run with an “unsupported” GPU.
This whole thing is EVEN more important now - I was helping a student on their laptop, and some brands now ship with a whole Co-Pilot KEY in between the right-hand modifiers, placed where there’s an odds-on chance you’ll accidentally hit it regularly. Not to mention you have to change registry values to disable it. The OS manufacturers’ Dark Patterns are invading hardware space, so every day I am more convinced that what we’re doing is important.
So - I hope my testimony here helps, and happy Linuxing everyone!
[EDITED TO ADD] And just now I went to my University-provided Microsoft 365 app online and the landing page has been changed to a Copilot chat window. I have no problem with “AI” - I use LLM’s daily to write shell scripts and ffmpeg commands. Heck I couldn’t have gotten Sway configured properly without it. So I’m certainly not a luddite. But boy are the tech giants REALLY trying to jam this stuff down our throats. We need independence and freedom from this every day more than the last with how pushy the mainline OS people have gotten, and this is yet more anecdotal proof.
)
, plain wine may turn out to be easier when things don’t go according to plan…
. I know VM’s can be straight forward once you get them tuned up properly, but my history with them has been spotty, like doing the same thing twice and different results happen. Probably just a me thing.