I think a second machine is way better than dual booting. Dual booting is a pain in the ass. I try to avoid rebooting the machine for any reason, its disruptive.

Better get an old cheap thinkpad or small PC. And you dont have to take the risk of learning about partitioning on your primary machine as first baby step. Keep your important stuff where its safe until such time as you are comfortable switching over.

Can’t think of any better designed and built software package I ever used than sketchup desktop. I wasted soooo much time making needlessly detailed 3d renderings of things around me. I sort of specifically dont want anything that good because it was way too engaging and a real time sink. So fun though. I miss it.

Its criminal to throw that much good code in the trash. If the companies don’t want it it should revert to worker control or go to an archive/conservation organization. Another great product destroyed by capitalism.

I now need the try the various viable programs that have been recommended.

I’ve tried to get away with LO Draw a couple times. It has some basic lacks that make is kind of impossible to use. What is coming to mind is that while it has something called “Layers” it’s not what you’d expect for a graphics software. I recall you also can’t lock shapes. So if you draw one thing on top of another it’s very difficult to control what you are clicking on. There was a bunch of issues like that.

interesting can it be run as a desktop application (not browser-based)?

it is not a vector drawing app. it’s a raster editor.

I’ve been hoping for inkscape to get usable for ages. I will always give it another shot.

So after trying it out, I will say it has improved a lot compared to 5-10, even 2 years ago. Some strange and unconfigurable UI decisions that waste huge amounts of screen space— it takes about 3x as much as it should for what is displayed. Only my small laptop display the interface takes >25% of available screen real estate. It would be impossible to do anything substantial. They’re still working out how to implement pallets-- but at least there are pallets now.

For this basic application I can deal with little odd stuff; every program has them.

Small problems for the question I posed: No unit of feet, but does have inches. There is a way to type the dimensions tho it’s not as smooth as Sketchup and it sometimes adjusts the values — I entered 58" but it became 57.570".

Main problem: Terrible stability. It has required hard reboot of my computer twice and killing the application numerous times. They have some documentation about how to avoid these problems but none of them apply here. The first time it crashed all I had done was draw 2 plain rectangles. I have a pretty stable system, this is very unusual.

Also here is something fun: Preferences don’t appear to be saved unless you properly exit. So when I spent time setting things up, then it crashed, everything went away. I experimented by setting a pref then quitting vs setting a pref then killing. Killing results in reset of the pref.

Crashing and stability aside it is massive improvement.