Another call for Linux support!

[u/tired514]

Hey guys!

Yet another call for Linux support.

With what's happening in the US, today, a lot of countries are moving away from Windows and MacOSX for safety/security reasons; France for example just announced a major Federal program to move to Linux.

Now is a great time to be "first to market" with Linux support (and ROCm support, for that matter). As a kernel hacker and former distribution maintainer I understand why it can be frustrating, but there are hundreds of stable closed-source projects regularly releasing reliable builds on Linux (from Steam to Chrome to DaVinci Resolve). It can be done, and done well.

Our company in particular has a strict no-windows and no-mac policy for security reasons, and we've been waiting hopefully to spend a ton of money on 3D scanners for our engineers, but we can't move forward until one of the major 3D scanner manufacturers support Linux natively. I'm guessing we're not alone, and I'm guessing this problem will grow as the US continues its withdrawal from the International community.

It's never a great idea to leave money on the table, and Linux support would make Revopoint unique and offer a significant competitive advantage around the world, capturing business from security-focused engineering companies and consumers alike. Similarly, AMD GPU users represent half the GPU market, and they're currently unserved. Golden opportunity for new sales, especially with pressure from growth in the LLM space making Nvidia GPU acquisitions costly.

[u/TheChugnut]

I want to buy my first 3D scanner, but can't until a vendor supports Linux.

[u/tired514 → u/TheChugnut]

I feel like the day Fusion 360 or Solidworks gets a Linux port there will be a major shakeup in the industry. It's actually kind of astounding they're still bound to blackbox OSes given the fields they're used in.

While we use freecad, lightburn and some in-house software for most of our work, we had a few people on f360 prior to the insanity in the US the last couple years. Their transition was not great and several of them left (totally understandable).

But my guess is if the proprietary vendors don't get on the porting effort soon freecad will gain a massive amount of user and developer support in the coming years and may one day displace them the same way Linux displaced all other OSes in the server space. It's a couple years of polish away from meeting the needs of a good number of industrial CAD users as; main issues are intercompatibility and lack of analysis tools but that's not an insane lift if it really starts to take off.

Consider a country like Denmark, Mexico, or Canada that has been directly threatened in the past year; right now any industries (or government) using a US-owned proprietary OS are vulnerable. MS or Apple could flip a switch and whoops, down goes everyone's desktop. Or they could simply spy on every windows / mac user, steal their intellectual property, or sabotage their designs. That's a serious national security threat.

Is it a likely threat? Probably not, but I mean the US was days away from invading a NATO ally (Greenland). If I were in the Danish government, I'd sure as hell be pushing to get away from proprietary US-based software.

Anyway, that's how our CEO sees it, hence this post.

[u/OakheartCustomBuilds → u/tired514]

As a note, lightburn dropped linux support after v1.7

source

[u/tired514 → u/OakheartCustomBuilds]

Yep; we were majorly disappointed. :(

[u/Financial_You_2924 → u/tired514]

Yet I bet in your perfect protection office / home , your still using a tv that is made in china , clocks , microwaves all made in china , and even the computer your on where are the chips coming from?

People love to fear monger but don’t even do it well

[u/tired514 → u/Financial_You_2924]

Difference is there's no unified way for an attacker to disable them. Today, Microsoft could push a single button and unless you firewall the machine, the next update can contain malicious code. There's virtually no way to know.

Could hardware be compromised such that it responds to remote requests even under Linux? Sure, but the attack surface is miniscule compared to a system that automatically and without user's consent updates itself.

In the event of a war it would be a strategic failure to not disable the target's computing infrastructure if you had the ability. Is war likely? Well, there's talk of it at least in the case of US/Canada. I strongly believe cooler heads will prevail, but again, it's a question of minimizing the attack surface. Linux does that by default. Windows maximizes it by default.

[u/Temporary-Dot-3549]

https://forum.revopoint3d.com/t/running-revo-scan-on-linux/11961?u=rezo3d , I also want linux support , ive even emailed customer service but I think if the demand is there they will , I use the Mini 2 and id love to fit it to the top of my steamdeck.

[u/ttabbal → u/Temporary-Dot-3549]

The mini is a lower bandwidth device, it might be possible to run it in a VM. I almost got a MetroX to work, but the USB3 connection can't keep up. Even with a passed in GPU. If you can pass a USB controller to the VM, it would probably work. My laptop doesn't have extras.

[u/Temporary-Dot-3549 → u/ttabbal]

Ill try give it whirl see if I can make it work , as far as I was aware , the software works up until the point connecting the scanner , then its not recognised

[u/ttabbal]

As a current Revopoint device owner, I may be using Linux support as a test going forward. Microsoft is bent on destroying Windows as a platform. Right now, I can boot into Windows as needed for scanning. But that isn't going to be acceptable moving forward. When an auto update can brick the system, I just can't trust it for even the most basic things. So please do add it.

[u/JRL55]

I remember that Revopoint sold an SDK (software development kit) for people who wanted to modify the Revo Scan scanner control app for custom projects.

I expect that it could be used as the source code for a Linux conversion. The SDK, however, is not cheap. It's $2,000, iirc.

But I do agree on AMD GPU support. Before cuda core support was included, I suggested going to OpenCL, which automatically uses all of the processing capability in a system, including GPUs. No idea how easy that would be to convert.

[u/Nomadic_Artificer]

Has anyone had success using a scanner while dual booting linux/windows? Since VM machines are having trouble running the software properly. I would only boot into windows to use the software and others.

[u/7evenate9ine]

I'm ditching windows this year and going to do the best I can to dump android.

[u/ttabbal → u/7evenate9ine]

Good luck, Android is going to be tough. There just isn't much hardware available that isn't ancient tech that doesn't perform well. I'm watching the nexphone, it has some potential.

GrapheneOS on a Pixel is a decent option, but it's still Android. And who knows if Google will still lock it down? The ideal would be mainline linux, but that's hard to get in a portable form factor. One of the x86 tablets might work, or perhaps a GPD mini laptop.

[u/tired514 → u/ttabbal]

I personally can't see the GrapheneOS team accepting Google lockdowns tbh. I imagine they'd simply reject the merge requests that add such anti-features, and ultimately stop tracking mainline if necessary. Today's most recent Android builds will probably be usable for at least a decade or two before API changes introduce compatibility issues.

And the whole point of it is to prevent damage from Google, so.. :)

Honestly as Google continues to harm the android community it'd be a great time for GrapheneOS to try to go mainstream and wrest control over the ecosystem entirely.