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Testing builds for macOS and Linux

Seamless CAD is sold for Windows. macOS and Linux builds now exist, and they are being handed out to testers.

They are not a product. They are not on sale, they have no release date, and nothing here is a commitment that a release will follow.

If you are willing to run software that may not work at all, and to write down carefully what happened when it doesn't, they are yours to try.

What exists
Linux x86-64
macOS Apple Silicon (arm64)
macOS Intel no build

The add-on itself is the same code as the Windows release, file for file. Only the geometry kernel — the separate executable that does the actual CAD computation — is rebuilt per platform.

Requirements

Both: Blender 4.2 or newer. Development and testing happen on 5.1.

Linux: glibc 2.34 or newer, and a C++ runtime providing GLIBCXX_3.4.30. In practice that means Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, RHEL 9, or anything newer. X11, fontconfig and freetype come from your system — Blender needs them too, so if Blender runs you have them.

macOS: Apple Silicon, macOS 11 or newer. An Intel Mac will not run this build at all.

What has been verified, and what has not

Being specific about this matters more than usual here.

Verified automatically, on every build:

  • The kernel compiles from source against OpenCASCADE 8.0.1
  • Every shared library it needs is bundled, and resolves without help from the build machine's environment
  • The kernel starts and answers on its port

Reported by testers, depth unknown:

  • Both builds run inside Blender. A small number of reports, macOS and Linux, all of them positive

That is the first signal from real hardware there has been, and it is the good kind. Treat it as encouraging rather than conclusive: what those testers actually did in the session was not recorded, so it does not tell us which features work. It rules out the worst case — that these builds simply do not start — and little more than that.

Still never verified:

  • Creating or editing geometry, beyond whatever those sessions happened to touch
  • Viewport drawing, including whether the Metal backend works on macOS at all
  • STEP and SVG import/export
  • Anything to do with stability over a session
  • Whether the macOS quarantine step below was needed

So a tester's report is still genuinely new information, and the more precisely it says what was done, the more it is worth.

Do not use these builds for work you would be upset to lose. Save often, and keep anything that matters in a separate file.

Getting a build

Builds are not published for download; they are sent individually. Ask through the product page and one will be sent to you.

Installing

Same as the Windows version:

  1. In Blender, open Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Install...
  2. Select the .zip you were sent
  3. Enable the add-on
  4. Press N in the 3D viewport. A Seamless tab appears.

Then follow the Quick Start.

macOS: if nothing happens when you start a session

The kernel is signed, but only ad-hoc — it has not been through Apple's notarisation, because that requires a paid Apple Developer membership that is not funded yet. macOS may refuse to run it.

It may well work anyway: Blender extracts the zip itself, and files unpacked that way do not normally inherit the quarantine flag that triggers the check. Testers have reported macOS builds running, so it does appear to survive Gatekeeper at least sometimes — but nobody has said whether they had to run the command below first, so this is still open.

If the add-on loads but no geometry ever appears, clear the flag by hand:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/Application\ Support/Blender/*/scripts/addons/CAD_8_1_5_1

Then restart Blender. Please report which of the two happened — whether you needed this command or not. It is one of the things we cannot determine from here.

Reporting

Careful reports are worth far more than many reports. What helps most:

  • What you did, step by step, precisely enough that someone else could repeat it. "Added a box, set width to 30, added a cylinder, set it to subtract" beats "boolean is broken"
  • What happened, and what you expected instead
  • Whether it happens again from a fresh Blender file
  • Your setup: OS and version, CPU (Apple Silicon or which distro), Blender version, and the add-on version from the zip filename

Two things make a report much easier to act on:

The kernel log. The geometry kernel writes to your temporary directory:

  • Linux: /tmp/seamless_cad_server_debug.log
  • macOS: $TMPDIR/seamless_cad_server_debug.log

Blender's console output. Start Blender from a terminal and the add-on's messages appear there. On macOS that is /Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/Blender.

If Blender crashes outright, say what you were doing at the moment it went. Even "I don't know, I was dragging something" is useful — it narrows things down more than nothing does.

Reports that the build simply does not start are just as valuable as reports about modelling. And now that a few people have said "it runs", the useful reports are the specific ones: which tools you used, and what they did.