I’m not a Linux evangelist, but I have recently embraced Linux Mint, everything works, everything is much faster, except my Sketchup Pro License. My only reason to boot back into Windows is Sketchup.
I’ve read about people getting Sketchup pro 2025 working on proton, so it does work but it’s painful.
Surely you could get someone on it for an afternoon to give us an non officially supported but working method of installation.
It pains me greatly everytime I have to boot back windows just to use Sketchup. Everything else works!
Thanks for this… my point to the Sketchup dudes is - if it can be made to work on Linux - why not save us money paying subscribers the pain - and make it easy?! I can’t be arsed to follow 58 threads comments, aggro and voodoo. everything else now works on Linux… I can play pretty much any high performance 3d game I want… but still i have to reboot windows to drag a few shapes around in Sketchup…
Its ridiculous. They could give the task to AI for an afternoon to write a proper guide/make their installer work.
That’s totally true. They do have AI at their disposal now, but I imagine they’re pretty busy with other priorities at the moment. Have you tried experimenting with AI yourself? GE-Proton is open source, so Codex could help you download and install it, then configure a dedicated environment for SketchUp.
I would love to use linux instead of windows 11 but unfortunately I don’t think that even with the massive migration, there aren’t enough users to make it worth it for trimble, not all the people that have migrated to Linux use Sketchup so right now all the linux users make around 4%, from that 4% probably 0.5% are sketchup users in the best of the cases, It will cost more the development than the licenses that are going to be sold, that mean losing money and companies like any other person hate to lose money.
Maybe the Trimble team has decided they can’t be arsed to check and write / rewrite and then support all the code for what I assume would be a very very tiny percentage of their user base.
You think you have aggro and need voodoo? What do you think makes software run on just the current supported systems, wishful thinking, magic?
So I don’t really understand why you’re rejecting the only option to still run it?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against running it on Linux or asking it to run, but for me it’s a bit more ridiculous that you, as a Linux evangelist, can’t make the effort to read other Linux evangelist advise?
The gaming business is a completely different area, with a huge user base compared to 3D modelling.
If you think it’s so easy to do it with AI, why don’t you do it yourself?
By the way, why don’t you run Linux Mint on a Mac, then you wouldn’t have to restart in Windows, but in Mac OS?
what are you talking about ? I gave you a link. then you just have to click on the other link.
here, the even more direct link. next step is me remote controlling your machine and installing it myself. but I’m on vacation, so I also can’t be arsed
they made it pretty clear, it’s a catch 22 situation
They don’t want to spend ressource and energy making a native linux version and support (for what distribution btw?) because there are too few sketchup users on linux, and there are too few sketchup users on linux because there is no native sketchup. talk about a paradox.
want to change their mind ? show them working on SU with a linux machine is a thing. Yes, paradoxical.
(I’m hitting the same catch22 with mac versions of point clouds and gaussian splats, I have to use them on mac to show there is a market on mac. but I can’t because they don’t work on mac in the first place. at least with linux you seem to have a path.)
nobody on this forum really has the power to do what you’re asking for.
right now, the best thing you could do is to show the viability of using sketchup on your linux machine. showing how / that you installed it (through the git above?), how stable it, is, how compatible with plugins, etc.
that would show Trimble that it’s feasible. and you would help other users thinking about jumping ships by providing actionable feedback.
However, you’ll still have to wait for the linux market share to rise more until Trimble notices it and says “hey, that’s a lot of people whose money we can’t take right now”.
for the moment, the userbase contains a lot of servers, and while more and more european gov agencies are switching to linux… I don’t think they are THE market for SU.
also, linux users have a very strong “free and open source” stance. I wonder how sketchup would do in there. On one hand I would like sketchup to have a linux version, on the other hand, I kinda understand their reluctance to do so.
so in short,
There is no official linux version and no immediate plans on releasing one.
The Github link above is the closest you’ll find (as of today) to a working SU26 version.
