Running Fusion 360 installer on Linux through Proton libraries

[Anonymous]

Valve recently released Proton, a new emulation layer on top of WINE. Proton has proven itself to be extremely well tuned for a lot of graphical applications, not only games.

I myself have experience running Windows software natively on a Linux host through Proton with stunning graphics performance.

During the last couple of weeks I've spent some time over the evenings to figure out if Fusion 360 would run this way. It would require no development efforts on Autodesks part and if it were to work gracefully, it could be added as a PlayOnLinux setting to make it trivial to get Fusion 360 running on Linux based machines. This would be a huge plus for FabLabs, Makerspace and Hackerspaces (which is more than a small part of the Instructables community). However, the Fusion installation process is actively working against me and I'm not sure if it is intentional, or just a 'bug'.

Here's the problem: On the Fusion website it is checked which OS is running on the host machine. As a Mac user, you get redirected to the DMG download, as a Windows user you get redirected to the .exe downloader. As a Linux user, no option is given, it just states that your OS is unsupported. It's great that it mentions that although I'm already aware of that fact. I tried to mention this over Twitter, but I got a standard message that this behavior was because my OS was not supported. (thanks again, I know, but I still want to download this file anyway)

So today I downloaded the installer on a Windows machine, put the file on a USB drive and headed over to a Linux host. I set up Proton 3.7 and told PlayOnLinux that I wanted to install an unlisted application through the Proton setup.

The Fusion installer starts, without any hassle, but after about 15 seconds I'm greeted with "Unmet system requirements". It states: "What's wrong? Your computer does not meet the OS requirements for installing and running the software. Fusion 360 requires a minimum of Apple Mac OS X El Capitain (10.11) or higher." (side note: does this mean the entire installer is the same for Windows and Mac OS? Because if it's just a different wrapper that would make it interesting...)

I hope this isn't done to intentionally hold me from installing the application on my machine, but it is sad to watch... I understand that Autodesk, in good economical concience, can't dedicate resources to support Linux. But in this case I'm willing to jump through the hoops myself to resolve the caveats. I've been fortunate enough to get a tour of Pier 9 in SF, I saw there that Autodesk cares about (partial) openness in their development! So I hope this is just an 'oversight' because nobody thought about using the application in this way.

I work in a University Makerspace, we've got a bunch of students passing by, using our 3D printers, lasercutters and mills (among others). Fusion 360 is by far the easiest program to have some serious work done in designing and processing a file to be manufactured. Furthermore, being able to write plugins for Fusion without the need to use virtual studio and .net frameworks like most other software suites opens up a new dimension in how our students and researches can make innovative designs (I'm talking generative design for instance). Having it available on Mac + Windows + Linux (albeit with workarounds) would make it a no-brainer to make Fusion our default choise. Right now, depending on the person sitting before us we advice them one of the following: OpenSCAD, TinkerCAD, Fusion360, Inventor, SolidEdge, Solidworks, Sketchup, ArchiCAD, Blender, Rhino, OnShape.

The only ones that available across all OSes are OpenSCAD, Sketchup, Blender, OnShape. All of which are inferior for general purpose mechanical design to Fusion 360. We've tried to suggest students to run Fusion 360 in browser, but support for it is not good enough and some critical functions are unavailable. We've also tried to run Fusion 360 in a VM, but few laptops are good enough to pull that off without running redicullously slow.

So, in the end, my question is the following:

Is there any way for me, or for Autodesk to help me, get an installer that surpasses the OS check and just tries to install on a Linux host system? I'm willing to do in depth testing of the system and present/log my findings to Autodesk and/or the community to help us all get further.

[ryan.bales]

There is a lot here to unpack. However i think it would be a disservice not to answer upfront - Linux is not a supported operating system for Fusion 360. 

The dev team isn't going to produce an installer that surpasses the OS check - for Linux nonetheless because its not supported or developed. The OS check makes sure we don't have users attempting to put Fusion on an unsupported operating system such as older MacOS or at some point i'm sure Windows OS's.

[Marcin.pomorski]

Hi!

It is entirely understandable, that the OS checks are needed, and giving them up would wreck havoc. However it would be great if you we could get list of the checks performed.

I'm sure I could get this info the hard-way (Process Monitor logging all calls of installer in windows), but that requires to go through literally thousands of calls - I would rather avoid that.

Once we know what is checked, we can make sure, that wine + proton correctly emulates expected behavior and give it a go.

[matthew.d.weger]

I have installed fusion360 and ran it with wine staging from wine hq repos. There are workarounds on wine hq for the installer(https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=36468)

---

@Marcin.pomorski wrote:

Hi!

It is entirely understandable, that the OS checks are needed, and giving them up would wreck havoc. However it would be great if you we could get list of the checks performed.

I'm sure I could get this info the hard-way (Process Monitor logging all calls of installer in windows), but that requires to go through literally thousands of calls - I would rather avoid that.

Once we know what is checked, we can make sure, that wine + proton correctly emulates expected behavior and give it a go.

---

. Everything installs and runs great. The only small issue is the floating windows sometimes get lost when you move the window around. I'm currently making a script that will autopatch the fusion360 installer so you can install it on wine. You need to install corefonts for it to run with "winetricks corefonts" as well as "winetricks vcrun2017". You must also set the AdCefWebBrowser.exe to run with the builtin d3d11 dll.  The installer window doesn't show any progress because the floating progress bar gets hidden but if you wait it will install. I'm actually impressed with how well it runs on linux. Hopefully the Autodesk team will embrace this. I see that they already had some linux os detection in some of their setup scripts so i know that there is at least some interest in the OS.

[Anonymous]

Very nice to see somebody made progress on this!

Must say I'm disappointed by the way Autodesk handled this.

Will try somewhere this week! 

Kind regards

[flo]

I am using stock staging wine 4.someting and i must say once the workarounds are done(which are quite stupid ones) everything works fine. In the end one had to decompile a python script, patch the version checks out of this, because the version checks are the only thing not really working, and start the installer without version checks. Except not seeing a progress bar in the installer and installing some dependencies with winetricks, everything works fine now.

In the end wine users dont expect to get offial support or anything like that, but also dont want stuff that makes the software not work with the compatibillity layer on purpose by the vendor. 

I also understand the fear of the vendor to be spammed with tickets of unsupported wine users because you cant tell from the application if it does or does not run in the compatibillity layer with the current implementation. But i would rather detect the correct runtime with some effort when crating support reports than denying installation at all.

[n719z]

---

@matthew.d.weger wrote:

I have installed fusion360 and ran it with wine staging from wine hq repos. There are workarounds on wine hq for the installer(https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=36468)

---

. Everything installs and runs great. The only small issue is the floating windows sometimes get lost when you move the window around. I'm currently making a script that will autopatch the fusion360 installer so you can install it on wine. You need to install corefonts for it to run with "winetricks corefonts" as well as "winetricks vcrun2017". You must also set the AdCefWebBrowser.exe to run with the builtin d3d11 dll.  The installer window doesn't show any progress because the floating progress bar gets hidden but if you wait it will install. I'm actually impressed with how well it runs on linux. Hopefully the Autodesk team will embrace this. I see that they already had some linux os detection in some of their setup scripts so i know that there is at least some interest in the OS.

---

I get stuck at trying to decompile the platform.pyc, it fails with

def _dist_try_harder--- This code section failed: ---

and no matter how I clean it up it always leads to installation failure down the road, even with all the wine patches. I tried under python 2.7, 3.5 and 3.7, ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, doesn't seem to make any difference. How did you get platform.pyc decompiled so that

maj, min, build =

shows up on line 323?

What exact settings for def system(), def release() and def version()?

My platform.pyc appears to be from 2016.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if Autodesk embraced wine and made it "just work" for 99.99% of linux peeps with a trivial python edit, while keeping it as "unsupported"? Hint hint. Thank you Autodesk.

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am a researcher and software developer in the field of mech. engineering and have been using Linux for years now.  But an efficient CAD/CAM software is one of the key missing piece for me. As I love Fusion 360, I have tried since several years to make it run with Wine but now the time has finally come where it actually works. 

I agree with others, it is fully understandable that Autodesk does not "support" Linux nor running Fusion under Wine but still, changing 1 line of a python script is all that it takes for us to be able to deploy it under Linux without much efforts (it could be a simple PlayOnLinux script). So it would not cost anything to Autodesk to have their installer running  without patch under Linux. This would please many makers and researchers/teachers (influential people) like me and would bring a advantage to Fusion 360 over other products (for free...).

For those who are interested, you will find my installation procedure here:

https://github.com/jcugnoni/Fusion360Linux

And the only change required to install Fusion is to modify the installation file: setup/platform.py , first by reverting it to the official platform.py from cpython 3.5 (https://github.com/python/cpython/raw/3.5/Lib/platform.py) and deleting all occurence of the string "winver._platform_version or ".

See my notes above for shell script.

[Anonymous]

Respectfully, this is simply not the case. Looking on winehq, there are references to a platform.py file, which can be reconfigured to bypass OS checking. I had it working some time ago, but that installation has long since passed.

[EasyDawg]

I wasted a year and $1600 on Onshape and it seems like you have to come from Solidworks to use it, I only have about 20 yrs on 2D AutoCAD so finding Fusion 360 and finding it so affordable was an amazing find for me. However I HATE Win10 with all that is in me and really LOVE Linux Mint. As I write this very reply Win10 is waiting for me to do a "forced restart".

I am not any type of developer but I do build my own computers, am fairly knowledgeable in software installation but very new to this terminal thing but have had some "late night" success with it so .  .  .  without having dug into it yet does all of this WineHQ and PlayOnLinux script stuff explained enough in the links and elsewhere that I should be able to pull off this install, Fusion on Linux, and have you all had any further progress with this?

Fusion 360 on Linux would just be so beautiful.

[Anonymous]

Install Lutris, it has a wine setup that you can download in about 30 seconds.

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I wrote this installation procedure a while back and it worked for me for a few installs at least: 

https://github.com/jcugnoni/Fusion360Linux

Have you tried it? It is not very simple for a beginner as it uses a lot of command lines, but in principle, you should just need to copy those commands one by one and run them in sequence.

Maybe someone can write a an automated script using these commands as a base to help beginners like you..

Personnally, I am still using Ubuntu 16.04 and my Fusion360 installation works well enough using this technique.

[jnackard]

So I've installed F360 via lutris on a gentoo system.  Works flawlessly, as far as I'm concerned.  Only gripe is it won't update properly...says the OS is not supported.  I've changed the os type to win 8.1 in wine config and still get the error that OS is out of date.  Anybody got a work around?  So close to not needing Windows any more...

[Anonymous]

I believe that there are lutris scripts for doing so. You won’t be able to update via the built in updater, AFAIK.

[Anonymous]

I get the point that Linux users just don't represent enough of the market to warrant an effort, but it seems that letting this thread live is a good start and a few crumbs of wine support would go a long way.   What would be even better is reminding your programmers that it would be kind to not do things that break the wine approach. 

Using a virtual machine is not such a good idea as most people run Linux for increased security and avoid the spyware.  Wine seems the preferred method for many reasons.

I would also be reluctant to use or develop a browser based version - browsers are constantly under attack and the compatibility is always changing - I guarantee that supporting a browser based version will cost much more than expected and hope it doesn't hurt AutoDesk as a company.

[Anonymous]

Respectfully, I don’t think anything they’re doing is willfully breaking wine compatibility. Most everything installed in a wine container (that I have personally used) needs special update procedures. I’m not about to pay them to support Linux natively, so i can deal with the the minor inconveniences associated with updates. If time is money to you, then you shouldn’t use Linux for CAD.

TL;DR: Linux support through Wine is more than good enough, and I applaud the good people at Crossover and Steam putting actual money into free software.

[jnackard]

Fusion360 using wine + dxvk (from lutris) now seems to update fine using using the autodesk updater.  Additionally, it is nearly usable with directx11 (works good with dx9).  Only glitch with dx11 is that the fusion360 logo screen takes over the drawing area when it loses mouse focus (I believe).  It comes back when the mouse passes over a highlight able element or the drawing area is clicked.  Also still something going on with z order stacking of dialog windows.  Last minor issue is it wont close and requires killing all wine processes.  Other than waiting for wine/dxvk development to proceed , anybody have any ideas on how to overcome these issues?

[EasyDawg]

The day we don't need MS Windows anymore we will certainly be "Living the Dream!"

[EasyDawg]

Sorry for the late reply. I will be building a new computer , Linux Mint, now as soon as I get a chance and am new to Linux but have done some of the terminal stuff and will try out your info in the link. Was going to do the Virtual Box thing for Fusion but saw below it may not be the way to go. Is Proton Wine, like Wine, Virtual Box or what? I run my business, learning Fusion, build my own websites but will not be having time to become a developer but we definitely have to dip in to lots of areas to have things right.

[Anonymous]

Support a linux version please, I know it would be greatly appreciated.