One of the great things about doing the Linux Saloon is that I get the privilege of learning from fellow technology enthusiasts. This time was no different and had an unexpected bonus that I found tremendously valuable. After our discussion of Zulip messaging service and Jinda’s discussion about this experience with Virtual Machine Manager, a developer from the JSketcher project joined us and gave a demonstration of this phenomenal CAD application that runs locally in a browser. Although it is still under heavy development, many of the core features are working as expected.
Although I do not have a need for something like Zulip today, I find the project quite compelling and the fact that it is an open source application that can be entirely self-hosted, really makes it quite compelling. Even if I were to implement something like this, I may not end up using it completely self-hosted and would even pay for the service but the fact that they make it possible makes it that much more compelling to implement.
I have never used Mattermost and my experience with Slack is minimal. I have used Microsoft Teams pretty extensively but between all the communication applications I have used Zulip does seem like it is really poised towards productivity based on the the way you can very quickly and easily create threads and move between them. I don’t know how it would scale over a long period of time and I have seen such things work in Discord and Matrix but the Zulip implementation does seem like the clearest and easiest to utilize.
JSketcher is a CAD application that runs in a standard web browser within Linux built on Node.js. The processing is done within the browser itself using the OpenGL graphic framework and is, therefore as hardware accelerated as your browser and computer can muster. Although, at the time of writing this, I haven’t not yet tried it for myself but the demonstration on Linux Saloon was quite impressive. I was impressed by the interface and user experience that was demonstrated. It uses OpenCascade as part of the technology supporting the 3D modeler.
Needless to say, this is on my list of things to try and explore to see if this will suit me in my quest to find a proper, parametric 3D modeler that will run on Linux. I am very excited to see how this project matures and am really hoping for very positive things.
References
Linux Saloon | 11 Mar 2023 | Zulip, JSketcher CAD Software
JSketcher Demonstration Videos on YouTube
Zulip Open-source team chat application
JSketcher on Github
AppImageLauncher | AppImage Manager on openSUSE
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