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Linux is very 'tweakable' so it is used a lot for custom software and custom pipelines. A lot of software can be run on almost all operating systems. Including

by thdrdt 7y ago

Linux is very 'tweakable' so it is used a lot for custom software and custom pipelines. A lot of software can be run on almost all operating systems. Including software that is used by the industry, like Houdini, Blender, Unity, CryEngine, Unreal Engine. And so on. So yeah, Linux is used a lot in the 3D industry. But my guess is that when it comes to CAD/CAM Windows is still leading.

qchris 7y ago
I think that's very much true in terms of engineering CAD/CAM. As far as I know (and I check back fairly often), none of the major CAD packages in Solidworks, Autodesk Inventor, CATIA or Creo work on Linux. The only local Linux CAD project I know of (if you exclude some of the browser-based ones) that's remotely comparable in terms of general 3D parametric design is the open-source FreeCAD, which has come a long way, but doesn't even support things like ordinate dimensions in drawings or have an official governing body for development. I been at companies with plenty of developers running Linux on their primary machine, but have never seen that be the case for someone doing engineering 3D design. Obviously that's just my anecdotal experience, but it seems to line up well with what I know about the situation across the industry as well. It seems like a bit of a shame- with some of the RISC-V chips coming out, and tools like KiCad, one could conceivably put together an entire hardware development toolchain from low/no-cost open-source components, but the tooling around mechanical build processes more or less requires buying seat licenses for it at the moment.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm going to be stuck doing CAD on a Windows machine for a good long while. Once you get used to the power of the programs, it becomes really hard to go down to something less powerful- and going from SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor to FreeCAD is like that- there's a noticeable drop in usability and versatility that might be okay for an amateur, but not as a professional.

by thdrdt 7y ago

qchris 7y ago

I think that's very much true in terms of engineering CAD/CAM. As far as I know (and I check back fairly often), none of the major CAD packages in Solidworks, Autodesk Inventor, CATIA or Creo work on Linux. The only local Linux CAD project I know of (if you exclude some of the browser-based ones) that's remotely comparable in terms of general 3D parametric design is the open-source FreeCAD, which has come a long way, but doesn't even support things like ordinate dimensions in drawings or have an official governing body for development. I been at companies with plenty of developers running Linux on their primary machine, but have never seen that be the case for someone doing engineering 3D design. Obviously that's just my anecdotal experience, but it seems to line up well with what I know about the situation across the industry as well. It seems like a bit of a shame- with some of the RISC-V chips coming out, and tools like KiCad, one could conceivably put together an entire hardware development toolchain from low/no-cost open-source components, but the tooling around mechanical build processes more or less requires buying seat licenses for it at the moment.

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
Yeah, I'm going to be stuck doing CAD on a Windows machine for a good long while. Once you get used to the power of the programs, it becomes really hard to go down to something less powerful- and going from SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor to FreeCAD is like that- there's a noticeable drop in usability and versatility that might be okay for an amateur, but not as a professional.