CAD is one of those hold-out areas for windows which is actually kinda strange because when it comes to non-CAD 3D software a lot of the big names are UNIX-native and got ported to windows at some point: Houdini, Maya and Blender all got their start on IRIX and run perfectly fine on Linux, 3dsmax… well, Autodesk. Somehow they started out writing their software for DOS and became dominant in the CAD market despite that.
Speaking of Blender did recently get its feet wet with some CADish constraint modelling but I’m sure it’s nowhere close to where it’s usable for engineers. If you’re an artist modelling something mechanical it’s damn useful, though, and it might be sufficient for some light hobby usage, that is, to feed a 3d printer.
Ditto. Seems like everyone uses AutoDesk or Bentley. Although I use them both regularly, they both fail pretty hard in some areas. Now there’s talk about BricsCAD. I’ve got my reasons to hate it that I don’t want to get into, but it is platform independent (as every piece of professional software should be). It’ll run on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
I went to Linux for all private use years ago. And man - I wish so very hard I could simply switch to a non win-native CAD at the job.
Ditto. Decade & a half but video games rather in the beginning.
CAD is one of those hold-out areas for windows which is actually kinda strange because when it comes to non-CAD 3D software a lot of the big names are UNIX-native and got ported to windows at some point: Houdini, Maya and Blender all got their start on IRIX and run perfectly fine on Linux, 3dsmax… well, Autodesk. Somehow they started out writing their software for DOS and became dominant in the CAD market despite that.
Speaking of Blender did recently get its feet wet with some CADish constraint modelling but I’m sure it’s nowhere close to where it’s usable for engineers. If you’re an artist modelling something mechanical it’s damn useful, though, and it might be sufficient for some light hobby usage, that is, to feed a 3d printer.
Even within the CAD space, I was running CATIA natively years ago under Linux.
Ditto. Seems like everyone uses AutoDesk or Bentley. Although I use them both regularly, they both fail pretty hard in some areas. Now there’s talk about BricsCAD. I’ve got my reasons to hate it that I don’t want to get into, but it is platform independent (as every piece of professional software should be). It’ll run on Linux, Mac, and Windows.