I am about to go to college for engineering and they require a Windows laptop because of the software we will be using (mostly solidworks I’m pretty sure) doesn’t work on other operating systems. I primarily use windows day-to-day for gaming and such anyways so it’s not a problem for me but I’m wondering if anyone had experience using solidworks or any other industry-class CAD software like Inventor on linux
I personally use FreeCad. But for school you are probably SOL.
If you absolutely need non wine compatible software on your machine you’ll need to:
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Dualboot if you care for power
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Use a VM if you don’t care for the additional overhead
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try wine and see what happens
See if your school has labs for this, might be easier and the computer might be faster than your laptop.
Personally I’ll just use windows since I don’t mind it that much, although even in my few weeks using it on the laptop I got windows 11 is significantly worse than 10, been having some goofy audio mixing issues. I do kinda want to try it on wine tho just for the hell of it and see what happens.
It’s a fun rabbit hole, and you’ll be surprise what works.
If you do try, Lutris is my go to tool to install and manage windows programs. That way you can try different versions of wine/proton.
However there’s a reason my main rig still runs Windows. I have Moonlight and Sunshine installed on it so I can remote access windows in my house.
Do you thing 3dstudio would work in a VM?
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=318
According to winedb no. Or at least garbage. That being said it was tested with an old version of wine, so who knows. Maybe it’ll work now.
@astropenguin5 @the16bitgamer
This is exactly why schools should teach general concepts vs specific software, FOSS or not.If a student is more comfortable producing their works in Blender than a ““proper”” CAD program, I see no issue. Each concept is covered in detail by the instructor, the end product assigned, and students then have to choose which software they want to invest their efforts learning, given the allotted time.
This approach would have the bonus of providing the student with not only the freedom of choice, but also its inherent burden. They would also be forced to learn how to learn, which is something that is being forgotten more often with each new technological advancement.
From my experience this should be the difference between University and College, but since OP never stated which program they were in, I presumed either the later or a pad prof in uni.
I remember while in Uni doing a Film and TV as well as a Game design course. We used industry tools like Game Maker and Premier Pro. But the skills we learnt had nothing to do with the programs. We just needed to show how to apply them in those software. I moved from Game Maker to Unity after the course.
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I only use onshape. It’s all web based so it works with any OS.
I’ve heard mostly good things about onshape besides assemblies being weird. Haven’t tried it out yet but I also have ~4 years experience in Solidworks already from using it for robotics club in HS and like it well
Don’t bother with FreeCAD. You are not a hobbyist, capitalist society is already cruel enough without you shooting yourself in the foot with weaker software.
As an Electrical Engineer I use GStarCAD (AutoCAD clone), it runs well on Wine. There are a few pre-cracked versions on 1337, some of them do not work well. I run it on Bottles on Flatpak.
Could you be studying Mechanical Engineering perhaps? Just dual boot for that. You should give up any attempt at getting those programs to run on Linux. You could use a virtual machine but you’d need a powerful computer.
Yep I’m doing mechanical engineering, and already like doing CAD on solidworks and have experience on it already so there’s no way I’m going to switch anytime soon. This post really wasnt intended to be trying to find how to run it on Linux, more just to see if it’s even remotely possible out of curiosity.
My current plan is to just run raw windows 11 on the Dell Precision 3571 that I got recently, I don’t use Linux nearly enough on my dual booted PC to warrant putting it on my laptop too, even though the PC will stay at home for the time being
Don’t dual boot latest Windows, use 10, ideally the LTSC version but it’s a taad harder to “acquire” and set up.
Latest will always have too many updates and moving parts.
Yeah my current setup is far from ideal, my laptop is pretty solid though, it’s better than my PC. Win 11 is kinda sucky from the few weeks I’ve been using it though
I tried it for a while to satiate my inner nerd’s curiosity and I liked it though, still worse than Linux on both technical and moral grounds however.
Yeah for the most part it is fine, it’s just given me some weird problems I haven’t had before, not sure if windows is to blame or the computer itself. For some reason whenever I am playing a game on steam and also in a voice call on discord the game audio will get cut out and/or distorted a lot of the time. The overall complaints are of course being somewhat bloated and morals.
That is discord being sucky. Have had that problem a lot with various headphones, only thing that helped for me was using another software to manage things.
As for your actual question, my father has worked as a mechanical engineer for a few decades (recently retired) and after the major players did switch to only windows (they used unix in earlier days) he always had a dualboot system at home just for CAD work.
Yeah that’s a little what i suspected, it’s worked fine on win 10 with the exact same setup thoughm What other software did you find that worked? And was something to replace discord or just help with audio mixing?
For the CAD, that’s pretty much what I expected and definitely seems to be the overall conclusion.
Yeah that’s a little what i suspected, it’s worked fine on win 10 with the exact same setup thoughm What other software did you find that worked? And was something to replace discord or just help with audio mixing?
For the CAD, that’s pretty much what I expected and definitely seems to be the overall conclusion.
Nah, it is not the bloat.
Windows sucks. Linux is much better. Keep using Linux and you’ll see it.
I was on the same boat 15 years ago. Still waiting solidowrks replacement on linux haha. All open source or free CAD is okayish, but they cant replace proper software like solidworks. Inventor, catia, proe, they are all decent, but solidworks became kinda industry standar, so better stick with it since you already have some experience (its easy to switch between them). Compatibility will stop you from using any other if you need to share files (not step or stl) with someone. Even different versions of SW (every few years) are not backward compatible. Solidworks is almost the only reason why I still have windows
It’s a shame to hear that all the advances in proton & video game performance haven’t translated into CAD tools? I was hopeful this thread would have good news on that front!
Yeah its sad. But dont lose hope, Im sure Im gonna run proper CAD on linux before I die haha
Using Fusion360 in a Virtualbox, works okish for the few things I’m doing. There are several projects on GitHub for running it with Wine, but wasn’t able to get them working on my machine. Maybe not industry Standard, but I’m also using OpenSCAD from time to time for smaller things (especially when I want to publish them).
Im pretty sure Inventor is the other main industry cad software, and considering they are both Autodesk it may also work ok.
I’ve used OpenScad a little, definitely agree it’s only good for small things.
ares commander. It’s cross platform and relatively inexpensive. They ship .rpm .deb and tarballs.
First time hearing of that, how does it compare with autocad?
For me it’s been a drop in replacement, it feels very similar. I don’t use all the features. It has LISP scripting support and a lot of the recent updates have been dealing w/ BIM. I do a lot of 2d drafting with the occasional 3d drawing to have something machined or printed.
I’m in the same spot. Ended up just buying a cheap SSD and dual booting with windows 10. It’s definitely not as convenient as it could be, but it works perfectly.
Yeah my main PC is dual-booted Linux mint and Windows 10, I used Windows more over time both because gaming is slightly easier but also the way my dad set it up there were time controls on Linux and not on windows so as soon as I figured out or was given the windows password it all went downhill.
I want to get back into using Linux more but I’m worried it won’t be until after college
You should learn Freecad for 3D and Librecad for 2D. They’re both used in professional production and works in every OS.
For gaming you should give a try for Linux. I just tried 3-4 games last weekend and they all worked with Lutris without any tinkering. Last time I tried 1,5-2 years ago and couldn’t launch any 2010 era game just as you’d expect from the simplest way.
Edit. Some coder guys have recomended me to learn OpenScad for 3D too, but I haven’t found time. They claim that ChatGPT knows OpenScad better than many other programming languages.
I might learn other cad software eventually, but I already have 4 years experience with solidworks and will basically have to use it for college anyways so I won’t get any benefit at the moment. As for gaming, I have gamed on Linux and know it works fine, it is just overall more of a hassle and needs more time than I can commit to right now, at some point I intend on fully switching over as much as I can and properly learning how to maintain Linux.
Complex CAD is extremely demanding on CPU hardware. The tree is built sequentially and the math is all single threaded. Once CAD gets past a certain threshold the software needs to start tuning the way the Kernel works. The regular settings optimised for throughput and latency become a problem and the software needs away to change this. I’ve been messing with the Linux CPU scheduler to try to improve performance for FreeCAD designing complex assemblies on an older machine. I finally gave in and ordered another machine, but am still curious about CPU schedulers in general. I don’t know how other software accomplishes improved performance on the hardware. I can only speculate, but I am willing to bet there are methods used to alter kernel parameters like the CPU scheduler in programs like Solidworks. The way these things are done is probably not portable to any other kernel.
I’ve been using system76-scheduler for a while now and it works great. You can create a profile for your desired software and all of its related processes and then assign a high priority (low niceness) to them.
Matrix multiplications could be at least somehow multi threaded and few fields has been more optimized than displaying 3D. Do you mean simulations maybe?
I would have thought they were done mostly on the GPU nowadays?
Open a .step file in a text editor and you’ll understand better. All the coordinates are calculated like they appear in a step file and they are mostly relative to each other.
I used SW in kvm/qemu VM with GPU passthrough, you can do gpu passthrough on most machines integrated or dedicated gpu, I’ve passthrough part of a integrated intel gpu on a cheap laptop and performance was really good, way better than anything virtualbox can do, if you have and are able to passthrough a dedicated GPU, even better
Brickscad might be the only “proper” cad solution out there imo
I suggest trying out Bottles. You can easily install it with one command through flatpak. I’ve had luck running a lot of windows only software used in hardware engineering.
What engineering software do you use with bottles?
I installed and used ModelSim and Intel Quartus for a couple of hardware courses that I had.
