By now most Linux users have probably heard about the Artcraft apps.
They are supposedly clean room implementations of existing applications, such as:
Autocad
Acrobat
Photoshop
Micrososft Word
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Powerpoint
to name a few. There are thirteen such apps in all, written in Rust and available to download for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. The Linux versions are available in flatpak, appimage, .deb, .rpm, and tarball formats. So they will work on most distributions.
Slackware is not most distributions. The only option that "might" work is the flatpak, and that only if it includes the needed version of glibc. The others fail. I hate flatpaks and even if I didn't, the disk space requirements of flatpak apps alone make them a non-starter on my system installed on a 128GB SSD.
You can't even compile the apps from the source code on a default Slackware 15 installation, as it requires Rust 1.90 or newer and Slackware comes with Rust 1.58.
However, there is an updated Rust package (rust-opt) available at http://slackbuilds.org which provides Rust 1.98. If you install it using sbopkg and export the directory to your path, the build instructions on their github site work, at least for Photocraft. It does not, however, install the app for you. You'll have to do that manually.
You can also compile and install the artcraft-launcer, which is supposed to install. launch, and update the various apps for you. It also builds and runs fine on Slackware, but it doesn't work. It downloads the appimage files and, as already noted, the appimages don't work with Slackware. You can fix this by copying the working app you already built over top of the appimage, but future updates will simply break them again, so the only thing the launcher is good for is launching the apps you build yourself and letting you know when new versions are available.
So yes, you can make the artcraft apps work with Slackware, but it's a tedious task that most users won't want to bother with.
I may build the current versions of the apps for Slackware and put them up on my Google Drive. If I do I'll post the links here.
James_Dixon
npub1rr…dpfl2
2026-10-16 19:13:48 UTC
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npub1rr9nrkygq565nv6hu3e25ypjlvgjnwnxmwcp7pv7u9zsr0kwtn7sjdpfl2Seen on
wss://nos.lolPublished at
2026-10-16 19:13:48 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "By now most Linux users have probably heard about the Artcraft apps.\n\nThey are supposedly clean room implementations of existing applications, such as:\n\nAutocad\nAcrobat\nPhotoshop\nMicrososft Word\nMicrosoft Excel\nMicrosoft Powerpoint\n\nto name a few. There are thirteen such apps in all, written in Rust and available to download for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. The Linux versions are available in flatpak, appimage, .deb, .rpm, and tarball formats. So they will work on most distributions.\n\nSlackware is not most distributions. The only option that \"might\" work is the flatpak, and that only if it includes the needed version of glibc. The others fail. I hate flatpaks and even if I didn't, the disk space requirements of flatpak apps alone make them a non-starter on my system installed on a 128GB SSD.\n\nYou can't even compile the apps from the source code on a default Slackware 15 installation, as it requires Rust 1.90 or newer and Slackware comes with Rust 1.58.\n\nHowever, there is an updated Rust package (rust-opt) available at http://slackbuilds.org which provides Rust 1.98. If you install it using sbopkg and export the directory to your path, the build instructions on their github site work, at least for Photocraft. It does not, however, install the app for you. You'll have to do that manually.\n\nYou can also compile and install the artcraft-launcer, which is supposed to install. launch, and update the various apps for you. It also builds and runs fine on Slackware, but it doesn't work. It downloads the appimage files and, as already noted, the appimages don't work with Slackware. You can fix this by copying the working app you already built over top of the appimage, but future updates will simply break them again, so the only thing the launcher is good for is launching the apps you build yourself and letting you know when new versions are available.\n\nSo yes, you can make the artcraft apps work with Slackware, but it's a tedious task that most users won't want to bother with.\n\nI may build the current versions of the apps for Slackware and put them up on my Google Drive. If I do I'll post the links here.",
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