I recently spent time at work trying to get OpenFOAM to do, well, anything using FreeCAD. I couldn't get it to install properly on linux or windows.
On windows, you're supposed to use some part of their autoinstaller through the freecad UI, which apparently didn't set some environment variable somewhere. On linux, I had package incompatibilities (using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS).
Hah, very true. I have been working directly with OpenFOAM upstream to improve the packaging situation on Debian/Ubuntu but unfortunately I didn't get started in time for the 18.04 release. It's a bit tricky too in that many FreeCAD developers use Linux but I would bet most of our potential engineering end-users would be on Windows. Thanks for your feedback.