Librecad on RasPiOS

bp · 2026-06-22T16:36:19+00:00

Has anybody had success using librecad on Raspberry Pi OS? I'm trying, and noticed that the about box reports:Version: 2.2.0-alphaCompiler: GNU GCC 12.2.0Compiled on: Dec 26 2022Qt Version: 5.15.8Boost Version: 1.74.0The compile date is four years from this past December, whichseems a long time ago for an -alpha version.I'm having great difficulty making librecad work by tring to follow the instructions, both in the librecad manual and inonline tutorials. If there's a good written (not video) tutorialit might help quite a bit, but I haven't found one.Part of my ineptitude is surely caused by first learning CADon a Macintosh (Ashlar Graphite), but I'm starting to wonderif something more (maybe an outdated APT repository) is partof my difficulties.Thanks for reading, and any suggestions,bob prohaska

Jun 22, 2026 Last reply: 3 weeks ago 45 Replies

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rbowman 3 weeks ago

https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/2070211673177399545 More about xfwl4:

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I worked with X11/Motif for years. Were I still doing so I would hate Wayland too. Sooner or later you would have to reach far down into the stack to do the sort of thing the Wayland developers consider bad, bad, bad.

I wish Tarricone all the best for his Rust project.

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The Natural Philosopher 3 weeks ago

I think there is a lot of 'I want do it this way and Wayland cant' Without the concomitant 'why on earth are you doing it that way?' and 'because that's the only way you can in X windows'.

I have an oil fired range stove and oven. If I want to reduce the heat on a saucepan I prop it up on three pennies arranged in a triangle.

Imagine doing that on an induction hob...

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bp 3 weeks ago

It turns out that FreeBSD's Ports collection includes librecad. It compiled from source using poudriere and seems to run correctly, if slowly, over the network using RasPiOS as an X terminal.

I have essentially the same troubles on FreeBSD's version as I do on RasPiOS's version, so the trouble isn't the software, it's me.

I'll continue fumbling about with the RasPiOS version in hope of a revelation 8-)

Thanks to all for reading and replying!

bob prohaska

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rbowman 3 weeks ago

Technical debt. The Motif GUIs I worked with went back to the '90s and had been getting the job done for 30 years or so. We'd looked at moving to a more 'modern' widget toolkit but it would have meant a complete rewrite, with no real improvement in functionality or even loss of some features.

In that case the front end was replaced with a browser based Angular app. It wasn't always easy to make it work 'the same'. As you know, users are very big on 'the same'.

The difference was it was our choice not something forced by distros saying they would only support Wayland and not X11. Personally, I don't care since I no longer have to work on the GUIs but I can see why KiCad, Xfce, or other projects with a long history on X11 get upset by seemingly arbitrary Wayland decisions.

The fortunate are those that used Gtk, Qt, or other tool kits that sat on X11 but provided a level of abstraction. The headaches get passed to the Qt and Gtk developers.

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Scott Alfter 3 weeks ago

Figures our resident troll would be a Wayland fanboi. :-P That's far from the only problem with Wayland. Check out this compilation:

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As for your point, what do you have against applications controlling things like window layout? It's been a standard feature of desktop interfaces of all sorts pretty much since the beginning. You'll find it in Windows, Mac OS, X11 and most of the window managers that run on it, etc. It's Wayland that is breaking a basic feature that's been around for decades.

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The Natural Philosopher 3 weeks ago

Well yes, but in the end they can get users to install X

Except the toolkit maintainers wont cover the very edge cases.

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