Visiting kicad.org, I’m reminded of proprietary SW companies that don’t want you to use older versions.
But I’m still on V7 and would like to keep it for a while. After a crash and restore, I’m back to 7.0.7 and upgrading to 7.0.11 is just not possible.
What kind of behaviour is this? Is there a “secret” FTP-site or similar that no one knows about? Or a special URL for the initiated?
Please inform, Thanks.
I’m not exactly sure what you are asking for.
Why is upgrading to 7.0.11 impossible? because 7.0.11 crashes? because you can’t find 7.0.11?
All windows stable releases can be found here:
https://downloads.kicad.org/kicad/windows/explore/stable
Apologies, it’s a Ubuntu OS. The PPA is obviously not working, and seems to be secret these days.
All references to versions earlier than 8.0 have been purged from the web site.
Does this do the trick?
Partially. The PPA is the one I already have, but somehow it’s landed in quarantine.
But I found this thread which solved the problem:
So I’m on 7.0.11 again. 
Doesn’t solve the total lack of 7.0 support on the website, though. Why should a normal user fumble around on Launchpad? User-friendlyness looks different.
Glad you got the problem solved.
Without I’ll knowing the full details, I would assume the link is removed for user friendliness.
Running older/obsolete versions are probably considered something only advanced users would do, since all beginner’s would be better off running the latest stable. Hence removing the link makes it easier to get the correct version.
I’m not a developer, so please consider this my personal interpretation.
Btw finding the link was the second hit on google for “Kicad PPA”.
Add to this, that on Linux OS, building KiCad is always challenging with conflicting versions of compiler, wx, Python etc.
The packagers are volunteers and usually focus their time on the stable release
The best would be to have old releases available as AppImages.
We are now in late September and well down the V8 lifecycle. I recommend V7 users jumping to V8 soon, before facing a more traumatic double jump to V9 next year.
No need for that. Just add the PPA and the deb package will be installed. No need for building at all.
FreeCAD offers AppImage self containing running images, avoiding packages conflicts.
It would be useful to offer AppImages also for KiCAD.
It’s called FlatPak and available on the download page.
Because this is the Linux platform you signed up for. File your complaints with Canonical for keeping launchpad a poor experience.
We generally want users to always being the latest stable and have no real room to support older versions. Even trying to list old versions on the website becomes a very convoluted mess once you start doing this for every platform.
No, it’s not FlatPak. It is AppImage and it is NOT available.
There are three major package formats for self-contained universal apps on Linux: appimage, flatpak, and snap.
I agree with this. I’ve tried a few times to get KiCad packaging on AppImage. It always breaks when trying to build/embed the python interpreter. In myriad ways. If you are anyone else knows the proper incantation for building this, we’d love to make/distribute KiCad appimages.
As a note, I’ve been able to build AppImages that run on the same platform they were built on but never one than runs across distros.
Hi @Seth_h
I have already packaged kv5 and kv6 for older versions of Linux.
You can find my repo in the post here:
But the real person to contact is @probono, who is the guy behind the AppImage repo.
At the same time another person to contact is “realthunder” @Zheng
He is the guy who generated the scripts for FreeCAD’s AppImages that run on different versions of Linux. At FreeCAD they are using Conda
Conda should be the key in AppImage building:
Conda gives the opportunity to distribute FreeCAD in a consistent way for multiple platforms. This is the biggest advantage of conda: A package-manager which works in the same way for different platforms.
Hoping you or your team will be able to give KiCAD an AppImage option that will help users to use different releases on the same platform.
Yes, AppImage releases would be really helpul! It would be enough just to provide the last release of a major version when switching to the next major version.
@Seth_h
I’ve made a query at FreeCAD forum, related to FOSDEM and AppImage …
It seems that FreeCAD folks are going to help 
https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?p=790411#p790411
Freecad is not on Fedora(“dnf search freecad” returns nothing), maybe Kicad gentleman can help them on this in return.
