Abaqus 2022 – A Great Update for Linux Users

I use Abaqus on both Windows and Linux computers, and I frequently switch between computers running different flavors of Linux. If you have not tried a modern Linux OS, then I recommend that you give a try. Some things just seem more natural and some software just seem to run faster on Linux.

In my opinion, the Abaqus installer is quite confusing, particularly on Linux. Perhaps my challenges are related to my desire to install 3rd party software to /opt on Linux, which is not where the Abaqus installer likes to store the files.  Also, the Abaqus installer purposely blocks the installation on unsupported versions of Linux. Unfortunately, the supported OS versions does not include Ubuntu, which is one of my favorite OS versions. The easiest way, that I know, of fixing this is to first install Abaqus on a supported Linux OS (I use RedHat 7), which can be a virtual machine, and then copy the complete installation to the target computer. This works, but it is certainly not elegant. 

The good news, and the reason why I really like Abaqus 2022, is that the Abaqus Standard and Explicit executables now finally work great on my favorite Linux distributions: Ubuntu 20.04 (I will soon update to Ubuntu 22.04), and RedHat 8.5. Previous versions of Abaqus did not terminate properly after a FE simulation finished. That caused all kinds of problems and odd work arounds. None of that is needed anymore.