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 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
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:
-
Dualboot if you care for power
-
Use a VM if you don’t care for the additional overhead
-
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.
@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.
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.
-
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
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
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
