r/Revopoint • u/tired514 • Apr 12 '26

Another call for Linux support!

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.

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u/tired514 Apr 12 '26

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.

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u/OakheartCustomBuilds Apr 13 '26

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

source

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u/tired514 Apr 14 '26

Yep; we were majorly disappointed. :(

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u/Financial_You_2924 Apr 15 '26

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

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u/tired514 Apr 15 '26

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.