Lately I’ve been greatly interested in scilab, in big part due to the XCOS and ATOMS functionality. As someone passionate about FLOSS I’d much rather work with scilab and xcos than matlab and simulink within my studies and personal projects, but also as someone involved in engineering education for high schoolers having a FLOSS option with this functionality (and large amount of example tutorials) would be amazing as licensing fees from mathworks would be too expensive, and we generally want to turn people towards FLOSS in the tools they use, and have them contribute to the open engineering (hardware or software) ecosystem in general.
I have unfortunately been running into multiple issues as well, being on the latest version of Fedora I assumed it wouldn’t be smooth sailing, and as expected neither the provided binary nor compiling from source gave a completely functional program. In addition to that I’ve tried running Scilab in Distrobox containers of Debian 13, Ubuntu 22.04, and Fedora 42 with no success as well (with the official distribution packages, as well as the official compiled binary), and then to be even more certain I’ve tried the same in a Debian 13 VM, again with little success. Scilab will run in most of these cases, but with limited functionality, broken help menus or ATOMS incompatibility being the most common. The same situation can be observed with the unofficial flatpak - for whatever reason the manifest specifies building it without the internal helper, but even removing those flags and building the flatpak manually results in errors with “add_helper_chapter”.
I’ve read through what I’ve seen on the forum, one of the developers mentioned before it’s unreasonable for linux distributions to update dependencies so often and demand all upstream projects to do the same, I have no qualms with such a stance, but at the end of the day I keep my system updated for security patches, most people will simply download the newest version of whatever distribution they choose if they’re getting started, and in the context of our educational programs keeping the system on an older version could result in issues with other software we need.
In light of that, I’m hoping you would reconsider publishing an official flatpak or maybe even more simply, an official appimage. I believe it would allow for the highest level of compatibility across linux distributions at the lowest amount of effort for you, and that would make scilab a lot more accessible for just about anyone who wants to try it.
Best regards,
Luka