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Proposition for making Archicad available in Linux SteamOS

Nader Belal
Mentor

Hi everyone,

 

It was already known that few members including myself have previously asked Graphisoft to make Archicad available in Linux for various reasons.

 

The answer were either a soft "No" or "We will see later", under the pretext that the alocation of resources for such an endeveour is prohibitly expensive, and that Linux as an ecosystem is difficult to takle since every OS has its own flavour and things may break with every update.

 

But if we extend our vision to the game industry, and reread the news that were released this year, we can find that Steam Gaming Platform have released the SteamOS as a Work In Progress operating system for providing Steam games in Linux.

 

So I propose that Graphisoft would contact Steam, with the aim to provide Archicad in Linux for the following reasons:

  1. It will make Archicad available natively in Linux as was requested by many of the members without the need of using virtual machines and/or any other means.
  2. Although Gaming and PC is not and was not an easy mix, the number of people that are using Linux as their daily driver for work & gaming have increased thanks to Steam.
  3. Archicad as a program would need libraries and resources that can be provided only by the OS, and as mentioned Linux Ecosystem can be confusing and messy in those aspects, which is an issue that is also happening with the Gaming industry, but since Steam OS is trying takle those issues, Graphisoft may ask Steam to provide thoses needed resources in Steam OS, and thus creating a benefitial partnership between the two companies, for Graphisoft it would make Archicad available in a Linux Ecosystem, and Steam OS would be seen more than a Gaming OS, thus increase the number of users.
  4. The number of BIM users that are turning to open source programs on open source system have increased drastically in the last few years, and it's expected to see that number increasing even further, and some of us would like to see our prefered tool of choice in an open OS.

 

 

A good friend of mine have once told me that I´m so brute that I´m capable of creating a GDL script capable of creating GDLs.
3 REPLIES 3
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator

You have to also consider that Archicad includes components from other software vendors who would also have to port to Linux.   Overall, my personal take is that there is no way that Graphisoft could break even on the cost of a port with continued maintenance and development...much less ever make a profit.  But, it never hurts to ask 🙂

 

One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB

Yes I'm aware, and I never expected that the transition would be inmediate. But on the other side:

  1. Bricscad, is already available on Linux.
  2. In the recent years new Linux OSs have being poping up to solve previous issues with usability, specially with new users such as Pop!OS.
  3. The open source commuity is catching up with commercial BIM packages and platforms.

 

A good friend of mine have once told me that I´m so brute that I´m capable of creating a GDL script capable of creating GDLs.

Graphisoft barely seem capable of allocating or even utilizing their current resources well enough to properly service their current MacOS and Windows platform versions and give users what they need in the most recent versions.

 

That they would dilute those resources even more by branching out to try to create a new OS version, with all the maintenance, investment and work that's involved in keeping such a new version current with the other flagship versions - and all possibly at the cost of improving badly lagging issues in the latter - would, to me anyway, seem to be a hard sell for most people already upset with what they're doing even with just the main flagship OS versions.

 

You're not going to find a lot of support for them  for taking on this sort of venture from most other non-Linux users, given just how they've been consistently disappointing in recent release versions.

 

 

But on the flip side, they lately have been in the mood for chasing and pursuing tools for segments that majority of users never asked for and don't really use, so in that regard, you probably have as good as chance as any to have them actually follow through on this.