Hi all, I'm the FreeCAD Debian package maintainer. I just wanted to touch on the "complex technical reasons" portion. Broadly speaking, it's an interaction with our scenegraph library Coin [1] and Qt 4/Qt 5--things work with Qt 4 on ARM, but crash with Qt 5, which is now the default build configuration in Debian due to Qt 4 removal. The full troubleshooting thread is on the FreeCAD forums. [2] That bug is an outstanding issue and blocks Qt 5 support on ARM, so if anyone wants to be heroic feel free to go digging there and look for a fix. The above post presents the instructions for a Python 2, Qt 4 build, but it's also possible, with the most recent versions of several packages plus a rebuild, to have a Python 3, Qt 4 build.

Since it seems like there's a good demand for FreeCAD on ARM between Raspberry Pis and even the new Pinebook Pro, and there's now opportunity with our recent DigitalOcean infrastructure sponsorship [3], I think I'm going to start up an apt repository soon for ARM packages, at, say, apt.freecad.io. That way I can provide the dependencies for Python 3 builds, plus FreeCAD itself in Python 2 & 3 flavors of 0.18.4 stable, and eventually daily builds as well. This is in addition to the PPA [4] which could provide ARM packages for Ubuntu on the Pi/PBP, but I mostly have those architectures disabled currently.

[1] https://github.com/coin3d/coin/

[2] https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=37458

[3] https://www.kwk.systems/blog/posts/november-and-december-upd...

[4] https://launchpad.net/~freecad-maintainers