Because of Windows 11, will Autodesk support Linux?

[lemelman]

In view of the controversy about Windows 11, when will Autodesk seriously consider supporting Linux? 

[TrippyLighting]

I would hope soon!

[Drewpan]

Hi,

What "controversy"? I can't say that I am the biggest fan of WinDoze but it does

work (sort of) for most applications. I can't say that I have attempted it but looking

at the way Linux handles most modern Games for the PC, I can't really see why Fusion

wouldn't work if you fired it up the same way. In comparison to a game the graphics

are not particularly onerous and the under the hood computations should be handled

the same way the gameplay computations happen in a game. Have you tried firing it

up under Linux using Wine or whatever the best Winulator is on Linux at the moment?

I agree that a native Linux version would make sense to most of us mere mortals but

I think the driving factors are more likely Big Business users. How many of them are

a majority Linux company? Would they take on a Linux version of Fusion? Considering

that early versions would be buggy for a while until they ironed out the major bugs

in a new stable release, would a big company risk their business on it at all when

the PC and Mac versions are mature enough?

From AutoDesk's point of view I don't think that they will be forthcoming with a Linux

version soon. It might be in the works but I would imagine that splitting the Fusion

team into PC and Mac probably slowed down improvement and maintenance

significantly because they were now supporting two OSs instead on one. How much

would it slow down development and improvement if you added another OS to the

mix?

I am not against such an animal as Fusion for Linux. I just don't see it appearing soon.

Cheers

Andrew

[MichaelT_123]

macOS is Unix-based ... thus porting F360 to other Linuxes... would be as easy as backing another apple strudel !

... or googling-conversation with a flock of turkeys.

Technically, it would equate to recompiling the source code (with very few changes). 

[jakerson]

I would agree with you, I like Linux, I use Linux, I am definitely not a Windows fanboy. But if Autodesk wanted to support Fusion on "Linux" (as Linux is a generic term) The first questions that would come to my mind is what distro?

Do we support Wayland or X11 or both?

How do we handle GPU, Think about NVIDIA vs AMD vs Intel drivers?

What desktop GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc?

And then you have the issue with different libc versions, different kernel versions, different packaging systems, etc.

Linux is powerful
Linux is flexible
Linux can also be chaotic
Big commercial apps need predictability

And Yes it runs on macOS however that is not a fair comparison, as the "just recompile it" argument, (at least in my mind) assumes that:

Fusion is written in Pure C/C++
Uses only POSIX APIs
Uses portable GUI libraries
Uses generic OpenGL
No OS-specific code
No platform-specific drivers
No custom frameworks
I doubt very much if any of that is true.

They can support macOS because:
Autodesk can depend on:
macOS-specific APIs
Metal (GPU)
Cocoa UI
Apple windowing system
Apple input stack
Apple sandboxing
Apple filesystem behavior

That’s not POSIX.

Don't get me wrong here, I would love to see Fusion run in "Linux"  but I for one have no idea how they could go about it and be able to support it. Plus I just don't think the customer base is big enough to warrant the development time.. 

[TrippyLighting]

@jakerson Yep!

Also, something that is easily overlooked is that Fusion uses a good number of purchased/licensed libraries that are only available precompiled from 3rd parties.

Nonetheless, I think it's time for Autodesk to seriously make steps into the Linux direction.

On macOS, Fusion does NOT use the Metal API.

[jakerson]

Noted, Thank you... I guess I just made an assumption on the Metal API.

And just so I am clear, I’d love Ubuntu (or some other distro) support and I’d probably ditch Windows if Autodesk did it. I’m not saying they shouldn’t — just that it’s not trivial. ‘Linux’ isn’t a platform, it’s an ecosystem. Supporting Ubuntu alone would still mean massive engineering, QA, and long-term support costs. It’s a business decision, not a technical impossibility.

[lemelman]

According to a number of YouTube videos that I've seen, the current Win11 continually harvests keystrokes and screenshots which it sends to Microsoft under the guise of providing AI data. Many organisations regards this as privacy violation. So do I. 

[TrippyLighting]

@lemelman what you are describing is "Recall" an opt-in "feature" for Copilot+, so not the "standard" Copilot.

It is not enabled by default ... anymore.

The initial rollout of that feature, however, was very controversial. It was part of a normal Windows update (AFAIK) and sent these screenshots every 5 seconds unencrypted to Microsoft's AI servers.

The danger of that was discovered immediately and that is the controversy. To me it is clear that Microsoft and and any of the other AI companies are eager to retrieve a users data to feed it to their AI engines, but have zero interest in keeping that data save.

[Quefelsees]

I sincerely hope so. However, I can imagine that this will take some time and will probably only happen if there is serious revenue decline because of users not being able to "upgrade" to Windows 11.

In the meantime I hope for WinBoat to get GPU acceleration working. By the way: I managed to get Fusion running on Linux using Wine and a special install script by cryinkfly. However, there are some quirks and it does not work for every PC as I have heard from others. Here's an accompanying video though in case you want to try it yourself.