💬 A Personal Message to the Community

[cryinkfly]

💬 A Personal Message to the Community

Thank You – and a Look Ahead

Finding the right words is never easy after years of hard work, countless hours of effort, and a passionate community.

When I started Autodesk Fusion 360 for Linux, it was a personal experiment – driven by curiosity, conviction, and the belief that Linux users deserve access to professional CAD software. What I didn’t expect back then was that this project would bring together people from all around the world.

Today – after many releases, tests, discussions, and setbacks – I found myself at a point where I was almost ready to give up. But then your messages came in. Your comments. Your voices – from every direction. And they showed me:

This project lives because of you.

So I’m writing this not just as a developer, but as part of a community to say a heartfelt Thank You. And to clearly say:

I will not give up on this project. It will continue.

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❤️ Thank You – to All of You

Thank you for your patience.
For sticking with the project through difficult times and trusting it.

Thank you for your contributions.
For every line of code, every bug report, every issue, every guide, every translation, and every small idea that helped.

Thank you for your enthusiasm.
For everyone who has supported, recommended, or used the project daily – whether loudly or quietly in the background.

And a special thanks to all donors.
Your support has been and remains a cornerstone. You made infrastructure, tools, and development environments possible – but more importantly: you gave motivation. Every contribution was a sign of appreciation that helped me through tough phases.

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🛠️ So Much Work, So Many People, So Much History

What started as a private workaround has grown over the years into an active and meaningful open-source project. People from many countries and diverse backgrounds have contributed voluntarily and passionately.

The project now counts over 2,400 users on GitHub alone, who have starred, watched, contributed, or followed the project. That’s more than just a number – it symbolizes the relevance and reach of this idea. And it keeps growing.

Add to that the many users who utilize the project without actively engaging — a much larger, silent community that we don’t see directly but who use and appreciate the work every day.

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🚀 The Decision: We’re Moving Forward!

I’ve thought long and hard about whether and how to continue this project. The effort is huge, the technology complex, and sometimes it feels like an endless mountain of tasks. But your feedback has shown me:

This project means something. To many.

And that’s a responsibility. Too much knowledge, experience, time, and passion have already gone into this. I will not give up. Not now — and not alone.

So:
I’m not giving up on the project. I’m going to continue it. With your help.

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🌱 The Road Ahead

Of course, challenges remain — technical, organizational, and structural. But I have clear steps ahead that I’m already working on:

• 📌 A new, transparent roadmap with realistic goals
• 🗂️ Refined repository structure for better clarity and collaboration
• 🐧 Improved installation processes and support for more Linux distributions
• 🤝 Inviting active participation — including contributor guidelines
• 📢 More transparency about progress, planning, and ways to get involved

I’m excited to welcome anyone who wants to join — whether coding, documenting, testing, or simply voicing support in the community.

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🧭 Conclusion: We Move Forward — Together

Autodesk Fusion 360 for Linux is more than just a technical project. It’s a symbol of openness, persistence, and what a community can achieve when it believes in an idea.

Thank you for being part of it.
Thank you for sticking with it.
Thank you for showing that great things are possible on Linux.

For free systems. For collaborative development. For everyone who chooses the path of conviction rather than the path of least resistance.

Let’s keep going — together.

– Steve Zabka 🇩🇪
Project Lead of Autodesk Fusion 360 for Linux

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This discussion was created from the release 💬 A Personal Message to the Community.

[cryinkfly]

I build a new script for flatpak installation without Bottles or ...

[NotChristianGarcia]

A native Flatpak version would be very cool. I imagine you would need to implement wine installation and updating over time though. There's sometimes edge cases, but flatpaks have been good to me, that's a very merited option.

Another up to date option would be to try and get Fusion installed and working through umu-launcher through umu-run. Bottles-next will be using umu-launcher (current bottles is a bit outdated at this point). Lutris, Heroic, Faugus, and more already use it (in one way or another) (homepage mentions guis).

• This is the umu homepage: link
  • DATABASE USAGE section details querying which games have fixes in database.
• umu-launcher how-to-run using umu-run: link
• This is the repo of umu-protonfixes. Each umu id application has separate installer steps/winefixes as .py files.
  • For example, Fable III on Steam uses this for init.
  • It would be cool if you had just one of these for fusion in gamefixes-umu. My non-knowledgeable brain believes it needs webviews, alls the envs, the qt dll fix, and everything you're aware of.

If you did integrate with umu-launcher then Fusion would hopefully only need to be fixed in one place and bottles-next, heroic, faugus, lutris, and more could run it. You can also run it with just umu-run on cli. umu uses glorious eggroll wine releases which boosts compatibility and performance (in some cases) compared to just plain wine. So that could be a value add.

I was able to get the Fusion installer started and prompted to sign-in with umu, but I couldn't get any browsers to open from it (I've only cracked into it once though). umu-run and faugus have so far been the easiest ways to deal with umu in my experience (nero-umu also looks good).

Pure Flatpak works as well of course, but might require more long-term maintenance (maybe?) (maybe it would be possible to flatpak umu?). I'm sure there's other options outside of these, just wanted to throw some info out there. umu has been rapidly progressing and I believe if you reach out they'd be happy to help such an important member of the "getting stuff running on linux" community. Just another option I wanted you to be aware of! umu wasn't ready for prime-time earlier, but I believe that it has hit its stride. Lots of OS compatibility, pretty large community, and decent docs.