this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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I have to agree with pretty much everything that you've said there. Since I don't use CAD professionally, and I'm not about to suffer through the windows experience voluntarily, I'm pretty much such with FreeCAD and (when I get around to it) CADquery. Hopefully more companies will start supporting Linux and free CAD devs from all the MS fuckery - might even get FreeCAD (or a fork) to be more productive and prioritize things necessary to be competitive for SMB/hobbyists.
Yeah, it's a real pain, sadly. Tbh, I don't think we will ever find a major CAD company support Linux again - even Siemens, who supported NX on Linux for ages have stopped.
From my POV we have two choices: Either we make FreeCAD a viable alternative that beats the competition or at least is on the same page as them - which I find highly unlikely with the current system, so a fork+someone who finances it would be needed- or we find ways to optimise/enable Windows based CAD on Linux*. The former worked for the other tool we regularly use: QGIS. That has become the de facto standard in a lot of fields and has sometimes even pushed out commercial competition.
The later is imho the better way for CAD as it is really really hard for companies to change their CAD (even within windows and with a commercial product) - I have a business estimate for an medical product company who estimated 30k € per employee under ideal conditions, possibly more if something goes wrong(Training, loss of production, licencing, converting of files, integration of external databases,etc.). We have done it for games (tbf,with a lot of help from valve) and surely can do it with CAD (which in theory should be easier).
The last option is a bad one: In theory we could use FreeCAD as a backengine and develop themes that replicate the workflow of other products. But for that FreeCAD would need to improve on so many points beforehand...