I've been able to run Sketchup successfully across several versions, albeit sometimes with some annoying quirks. When I installed Sketchup 14, however, it doesn't work at all. The sketchup window opens and then it freezes (and it just has garbage contents of whatever was on the screen).

I had this problem under Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit and I have now upgraded to 14.04 64 bit and the behavior remains unchanged. I also switched graphics devices between Nvidia and intel, and that didn't seem to matter. Wine is at version 1.6.2.

Does anybody know if Sketchup 14 works with Linux/Wine?

In a very recent Wine newsletter (http://www.winehq.org/wwn/367), Sketchup was marked as going from bronze to garbage. I am hoping whatever change caused this will be resolved soon, but as of Wine 1.7.16 I could not get Sketchup working in Wine.

That's interesting. I notice that several programs have degraded with the latest wine release, even several that went from platinum to garbage.

In my case Sketchup 13 works fine but Sketchup 14 doesn't work at all---with the same wine version (1.6.2). Have you tried older Sketchup versions with Wine 1.7.16?