I am running Debian, which Ubuntu is built on top of. So you should be good to go.
7.0 is the latest version that works.
I’ve had luck following the RNA Design Labs tutorials linked above.
I have had the best luck with wine-staging rather than wine-stable.
It is highly advised to use a separate environment (WINEPREFIX).
I use sway for window management, which is a bit of a pain. I can confirm it runs pretty perfectly on Gnome and KDE Plasma.
Sway uses Wayland as its compositor, which seems to be no bueno to wine applications. Previously I ran i3, but was running in to problems from X11 as the compositor with Grasshopper, so I switched from i3 to Sway. So in sway it seems to use XWayland (the X11 compatibility library for Wayland) - but this seems to have fixed the issues I was having with straight X11.
I use it daily and other than the wine file dialogs being slow and a pain in the ass it is production-ready. For example, rather than deal with the annoying wine dialogs you can drag and drop files from your file manager in Linux to the Rhino window and they open fine. This doesn’t seem to work with Grasshopper though.
I have broken it multiple times trying different methods to attempt to get other file picker dialogs, but I’ve been able to recover every time.
Give it a go and if you run into any difficulties, just jump back on here - we’re all eager to help spread the gospel.
Seeing that 8.0 or WIP / 9.0 are built on fully cross-platform versions of .NET while 7.0 is built on .NET 4.8, do you think there will be any performance or quality of life improvements stemming from this change that we’d get if someone figures out how to get Rhino 8 or later working? I’m super excited nonetheless, but it would be extra awesome if this were the case.
Rhino 8 on Windows 11 on a QEMU / KVM instance works perfectly. It’s just a little slow for my tastes. The file picker dialogs are much faster though. I also have Rhino 8 set up and running through Winboat, which works perfectly as well with the same limitation (slower running) and advantage (faster file dialogs).
On wine, even complicated grasshopper scripts run perfectly - and since I don’t have any that rely on CUDA, at native or near native speeds.
@hitenter I tried the method that are out there to get Affinity running on Linux without a VM, and they didn’t work well for me. But if they ported to Linux, I think my partner might feel comfortable leaving the VM she works in for CC altogether. The only programs she’s so much more comfortable with in Windows than the Linux alternative are Photoshop and Lightbox - and even then she still uses Darktable extensively.
I already use all Linux native stuff, as outlined here.
Agree, but a linux purist will argue that it’s “cheating”, wine is more integrated with desktop environment and can be tweaked more easily
But as things stand virtual machine is a good solution, you don’t even need virt-manager really, here is a short recipe to run a windows provided virtual machine straight through qemu/kvm offline (networking can get more involved):
What is interesting in this article is the following:
Quote: ‘Canva quietly dropped a bombshell at the launch of the company’s Johannesburg office on Tuesday: the design giant is seriously considering porting its Affinity creative software to Linux. There’s no green light just yet, but global marketing lead for Affinity by Canva, Liam Fisher, told TechCentral that it’s being discussed seriously internally and that it’s one of the top requests from users of the software.’
What stands out in this article is the following point, is this quote itself… the top requests from users… So interesting! If Affinity becomes available on Linux, it would be a major milestone. Imagine running OnlyOffice, the equivalent of Microsoft Office but better and free, alongside Blender, FreeCad, BricsCad, ComfyUI, DaVinci Resolve, Steam games, VS code, Any LLM driven by Python, Zoom, Unreal, Maybe Affinity soon (a kind of new abobe but better) and nearly every browser, all natively on Linux. After that, the next logical steps would be Twinmotion and Rhino/GH. Many of us would love to see that entire Mcneel ecosystem make its way over to Linux.
In China, Ubuntu is used extensively for CAM workflows, so the precedent is already there. This is why it is high on my personal wishlist, because I am genuinely ready to switch completely to Linux. I am sick and tired of the alternatives. I was an Apple fan for years, but after Steve Jobs left and the company changed direction, my enthusiasm faded. Linux now feels like the only real option. I have no interest in going the Chinese HarmonyOS route either, because it offers even less freedom than Windows. So the choice is clear, any distribution is fine, as long as it is Linux.
Keep in mind that Linus Torvalds uses Fedora because it’s closely aligned with the Linux kernel developers, but you can still use Arch Linux, Ubuntu, or Linux Mint.
Okay, so, I did a test just for fun because I wanted to see if I could revive an old laptop using Linux and run Rhino.
I installed WSL 2 on my Windows machine. I installed Steam using its .deb package, followed by the apt --fix-broken-install command. I logged in. I added the Rhino8 installer as a Non-Steam Game. I right-clicked on it in my library. I selected the Proton 10 compatibility layer. I changed the installation folder to point to my $HOME folder, in a special folder I created.
Then WSL tried to be smarter than me and ran the installation outside of WSL, which messed up my regular Windows installation
I am trying to switch to linux an rhino3d is crucial. I read through this long feed and managed to get the QEMU/KVM method to work with only one issue. Rhino only finds a microsoft GDI generic video hardware and driver, not my Nvidia graphic card. This results in a bad display for rendered or arctic view. Same Problem with the Winboat method.
Did anyone else encounter similar problems? And even better, did anyone solve this problem.
Hello, congrats on getting your vm working! I see your post in Rhino on Linux - Technicalities about the issue you’re having. I have not had the patience to get full GPU passthrough working. I have been lucky enough that, absent some speed bumps, my wine Rhino setup has worked well since I tried implementing it. So the extra effort for GPU handoff just wasn’t worth it. But good luck - post your results and anything you had to do to get them (maybe doing this in the other thread is best), and you’ll have avid readers.
For your reference, this is a neat guide for getting one other Windows program running. Key point: use Flatpak so that it works for any and every Linux user, no matter what distribution they use (Bottles launcher/manager is used here):
This is great. I feel like Canva has noticed the demand around popularity of their programs on Linux and is leaning in to it. This isn’t Rhino related, but it’s in response to your and @hitenter ‘s mentions of Affinity here. The folks at 404 Media just produced a zine - which they talk about in their latest podcast. They mention Ernie Smith and his use of Affinity on Linux for this, and Ernie just posted a good blog post about it too.
Although - Darktable is an extremely capable Lightroom replacement that even has some advantages over it. GIMP is quickly making up ground on Photoshop. Inkscape is a perfectly functional Illustrator replacement. And I think Scribus is under-rated as an InDesign replacement. But - in terms of InDesign as discussed in the blog post, I’m surprised more people don’t know about VivaDesigner. It seems to be a professional grade publishing and layout software…
What Canva has achieved is pretty impressive. Not only have they managed to offer the software for free, they’ve also blended all their tools into one solid ecosystem. For example, unlike GIMP or Inkscape, Affinity handles both RGB and CMYK properly thanks to the built-in Pantone chart, so any graphic professional can jump in without worrying about their colour accuracy. That’s a huge advantage. Now imagine something like that running on Linux, it would give the community a real boost.
The big challenge with Linux Desktop is the fragmentation. We really could use fewer distros, because the desktop scene sometimes feels like a giant market stall with everyone shouting their flavour of the week. Personally, I stick with Fedora, mostly because the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, uses it himself and it stays close to the kernel.
If we want Rhino to take a leap of faith and come to Linux, they’ll need a strong partner. And honestly, who’s bigger in this space than Red Hat?
Please, McNeel team, we urgently need a Linux version of Rhino/Grasshopper before we completely lose our sanity.
If Google Anitigravity chooses Fedora as its distro of choice, that alone says quite a lot about the importance Red Hat holds in the developer world. Consider it a quiet endorsement, with a penguin’s nod of approval.
I reinstalled and ran the R8.22 installer I have locally - since this one is new enough to use .net 8.0. Excitingly I got a different terminal failure event -
0160:err:eventlog:ReportEventW L".NET Version: 8.0.14\n"
0160:err:eventlog:ReportEventW L"Description: The application requested process termination through System.Environment.FailFast.\n"
0160:err:eventlog:ReportEventW L"Message: Encountered infinite recursion while looking up resource 'Arg_ExternalException' in System.Private.CoreLib. Verify the installation of .NET is complete and does not need repairing, and that the state of the process has not become corrupted.\n"
I don’t know if this falls short of the prior overflow issue or is a step in the right direction… maybe @Winer could tell us.
