I have an issue when first time opening kicad on my new computer, the option “Copy default global footprint library table (recommended)” is grey and I cannot select it. It may be related, I’m using the linux arm64 version of the software, a work aroung would be to download the default footprint library table and add it as custom global footprint library table. I could use some help here.
I’m Windows user.
I have seen sometimes at forum that in linux you don’t have full KiCad installer, but you have to install KiCad and separately library. Until you don’t have library installed you probably also don’t have library lists. It is only my guess.
If you want help you need to provide more information.
What is your Linux distro? How did you install, packages, or containers (e.g. snap, flatpak)?
And most important copy your version info from Help > About KiCad > Copy Version Info and paste into a preformatted text box (</>) from the menu above the reply panel.
Some distros don’t make it mandatory to install the standard library packages with the application package.
In the end, I went with flatpak for installation, which gave me a newer version, and now it works. I’m using linux 6.1 arm, with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Armbian 26.2.0-trunk.45 noble), with KDE plasma x11. And my version of kicad is now Version: 9.0.6, release build.
This from the Kicad download site pretty much says it all:
FlatPak
FlatPak is a software distribution system that allows us to provide up-to-date versions of KiCad on many Linux distributions. FlatPak is officially supported by KiCad and is our recommended way to install the latest version of KiCad on any distribution other than Ubuntu and Fedora, if it is not available through your distribution’s package manager.