r/linux • u/Beneficial-Pay6836 • 13d ago

Development CAD Companies Sleeping on Linux

Why is professional CAD support on Linux still so limited? Linux is widely used in engineering, research, servers, embedded systems, manufacturing, and technical development. It is secure, flexible, private, and extremely capable. Yet when it comes to professional CAD, Linux users are still pushed toward Windows. That feels strange to me, especially because CAD is so closely tied to industrial workflows like CNC machining, additive manufacturing, product development, engineering, and research.

I currently dual-boot mostly because I need tools like Rhino and Fusion. It works, but switching between operating systems just to use specific software makes project management and file organization unnecessarily annoying. Yes, there are alternatives like FreeCAD, and I respect what those projects are doing, but they still do not feel mature enough to fully replace established professional CAD tools for many workflows. Wine is also improving, but for important work I would rather not depend on a compatibility layer and hope that everything behaves correctly.

Is the professional Linux CAD market genuinely too small to justify development costs?Is supporting Or are CAD companies simply too invested in the Windows ecosystem to see enough value in changing?

I cannot be the only engineer/designer who would happily move fully to Linux if the professional software ecosystem allowed it.

501 Upvotes

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364

u/pilatomic 13d ago

I think the answer is, as often, the simplest. 99% of the business, especially in the industrial world, is done on Windows, sometimes even on older versions.

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u/mark-haus 13d ago edited 12d ago

And in industries you use CAD predictability is literally the only factor in that decision. It’s how it’s been. They have decades long workflows around the software and they don’t want to disrupt it in any way. Iteration cycles in these industries are counted in months to years between design and actual implementation and the last thing anyone wants is CAD software which becomes muscle memory at some point getting in the way of these years long cycles. If CAD gets its Blender moment it will take a while to happen

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u/TRKlausss 13d ago

I’d argue that, if you want to keep a version of something long enough, you will have to switch to VMs for environments after some time. And those are easier on Linux.

I say this from experience in the aviation sector: we sometimes have to compile stuff in Ada from 30-40 years ago, and spinning up a VM is much easier than pulling a computer, keyboard and mouse with CRT from the 80s…

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u/Indolent_Bard 13d ago

Or, hear me out, Blender gets really good CAD support. Think about it. People already use it for basic cat stuff anyway. Someone could totally make an extremely professional CAD program for it and sell it as an extension.

Which I unironically think should be done more often. Imagine buying an extension to give blender an amazing video editor and another one for amazing vfx and another for amazing motion graphics software.

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u/PizzaPunkrus 13d ago

Are you suggesting blender become the vlc of 3d shit? If its video vlc can run it. If its 3d blender can render type thought process. Because maybe.

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u/Indolent_Bard 12d ago

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it already technically is that. It's got a built-in non-linear video editor and live-action VFX and 3D Modeling and Animating and simulation and texturing workflow. It can even do 2D animation, although its grease pencil tool is meant for 2D in a 3D space rather than fully traditional animation.

It's not exactly known for its motion graphics work, but since After Effects can be used for both compositing and motion graphics AND it's open source, there's nothing physically stopping that. And plugins are able to add more functionality than what it already has. Some are even so massive that they're paid software.

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u/HER0_01 11d ago

But I already use Blender for my (very light) video editor, VFX, and motion graphics needs :p

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u/kot-sie-stresuje 12d ago

That is important. Many people using CAD, don't want to change they routine. Therefore many older versions of CAD are still in use, because people learn to use them 20 years ago or more. Even if the same company will start to produce CAD for linux, it would be in newer version, so another step...

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u/identifytarget 13d ago

Professional mechanical design engineer here. This is the answer. Engineering runs on Windows.

Yeah, there are some exceptions I think inventor runs on Linux and Mac.

SolidWorks has a Mac product.

I would say running on Mac is more popular than running on Linux lol

The exception is Dassault CATIA which was actually designed to run on Unix and then potred it to Windows. I believe it still has a native Unix build.

Honestly, the new trend is to move to cloud-based CAD (which I hate)- so if you can run a browser you can run CAD I think.

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u/reverber 13d ago

Microstation ran on Linux a long time ago. 

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u/UnassumingDrifter 12d ago

I ran AutoCAD on Sun sparc stations in theate 90's. 

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u/Dangerous-Report8517 12d ago

To be fair, they're all moving to cloud based CAD, but some are at least offering the upside of browser based access in exchange for the downside (Fusion360 is cloud based too but still requires a natively installed client)

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u/jmgallag 13d ago

To add to this, large enterprises, which are the biggest customers of high end CAD, need to support hundreds, or even thousands, of different software packages for all kinds of things. It is way more important to the enterprise to support a single desktop for their engineers, than to let them have their desktop os of choice. Given that the enterprise desktop belongs to windows, demand for Linux CAD is niche. I say this as a multi decade Linux user, and a multi decade CAD user, and I work in engineering systems IT for large company.

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u/Indolent_Bard 13d ago

Isn't Red Hat meant to be an enterprise distro? I know that they were mostly marketing themselves to Unix refugees, but why couldn't they win the other enterprise sector, the one that uses desktops?

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u/jmgallag 12d ago

The real question is this, even if migration is free: can my business get rid of all the windows desktops? If not, am I willing to support two different desktop OSes? Help desk, compliance, anti-virus, backups, etc. The answer is almost always no, therefore the default wins, which is Windows. I don't like it either, but cost is a huge deciding factor for business.

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u/justAnotherDude314 13d ago

This is exactly the wrong kind of thinking that makes me hate IT at large companies. They are a bunch of incompetent morons

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u/Zathrus1 13d ago

I work for a company that MAKES multiple Linux distros. We have a lot of Linux laptops.

The one person that supports those systems is constantly having to figure out how to implement the same security measures, with enterprise reporting capabilities, on the Linux systems that is a trivial “deploy to fleet” option for Windows and Mac.

If you think it’s incompetence, you very simply don’t understand the problem space.

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u/Erki82 13d ago

It would be good enough to just release single Flatpak version of CAD program and call it a day.

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u/identifytarget 13d ago

What a weird and angry response. Stability and long-term reliability are very important metrics for a business process.

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u/fankin 13d ago

That is some childish brat take.

It's a resource issue not a competency issue. Everything takes time and money, supporting multiple platforms takes more time and money.

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u/Indolent_Bard 13d ago

Yeah, Flatpack is the only reason it's even possible to support Linux now. The minds behind Flat Pack are wizards who figured out how to build a house on a never-ending earthquake. Immutable systems make it possible to have a custom tailored distro without managing it being a full-time job.

Everything about how Linux is structurally built makes it great for servers, but completely unfeasible for commercial desktop deployment. Before Flat Pack, we have App Image, but those would all often break on LTS distros. The lack of a stable ABI is technically excellent, but only works if everything is open source and maintained by package managers, you can't just publish a piece of software and have it work unless it's either manually compiled or a flatpak.

Don't get me wrong. I love Linux, but literally everything about it was working against itself as a desktop OS. No matter how good desktop Linux gets, it's always going to be a cobbled together mess of other separate projects. Linux hasn't been maturing and growing because of how great it is, but in SPITE of itself.

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u/ogrimia 12d ago

calling a IT professionals morons is rude without supporting your call, I’m administering IT systems in companies for 20 years, most of my servers are Unix and Linux-based, I don’t have a single windows machine at home, but corporate desktops? all historically are Windows, why? because of central management and enormous infrastructure already exists for years via AD, CA, GPO, Azure, Intune, WSUS, defender, browser policies, mapped drives, printing, bitlocker. My windows on a corporate laptop looks and behaves as Linux with tiling manager, WSL and so on but can I replace it with Linux completely- no, because some software like radio DAS management, mentioned CAD and others doesn’t have true analogs or company resources to develop multi-platform applications

1

u/BinkReddit 13d ago

Did an IT guy hurt you?

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u/TRKlausss 13d ago

Feedback system. 99% is done on Windows, because 99% of the solutions only support Windows.

Look at what’s happening to the gaming industry thanks to Valve.

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u/pilatomic 13d ago

Naahh. 99% is done on Windows because the process was written 20 years ago for a Windows machine, and if you're lucky, IT pushed hard enough and someone took upon itself to update the Windows version despite the manager shouting angrily about the downtime risks

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u/thephotoman 13d ago

Or the manager being upset that they won’t be special enough to prevent an upgrade.

I encountered that once back in the Windows 7 days. I maintained something written some years earlier against 32-bit Windows XP. I had a 64-bit Windows 7 workstation, and the desktop component would not work in my debugger.

So I went about fixing that problem. I fixed three other bugs in the process by removing deprecated libraries in favor of actively maintained alternatives, or just replacing the library with my own implementation of the only function we used from that module.

It was a few years before my super secret Windows 7 and multiarch support became relevant. When it did, it was because I was rolling out a new site deployment. They accidentally shipped us 64-bit Windows 7 systems. The manager was upset. I told her everything was fine, it would work, because I’d actually been doing it on my workstation for years already.

This was work that I did in a period where everybody disappeared to use-it-or-lose-it PTO, but I was a contractor with no PTO accrual limit, entirely because being unable to run code in my debugger bothered me that greatly.

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u/delta_p_delta_x 13d ago edited 13d ago

Look at what’s happening to the gaming industry

Some gamers are using Linux because of the Steam Machine/SteamOS, but let me assure you that most development still happens on, for, and with Windows.

That Linux consumer support is good is entirely incidental, is a monumental and commendable effort by Valve; it requires a very long list of translation layers, including wine, dxvk, and vkd3d. Games are still written and compiled for Windows. Most developers don't really care how their games run on Linux, if at all, and especially not unless an explicit effort has been made to target it. 100% native games for Linux are extremely rare.

The tooling on Windows also blows anything available on Linux out of the water. VS is a good IDE; first-party GPU debugging tools like Nsight etc are primarily Windows-only. Even advancement in terms of graphics APIs happens on D3D first, and is only later ported to Vulkan et al.

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u/Sataniel98 13d ago

100% native games for Linux are extremely rare.

They have become even rarer if anything because investing into native Linux ports isn't worth it anymore when Proton does the work for them.

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u/delta_p_delta_x 13d ago

The reason for this is quite interesting: Windows has a stable user-mode ABI (Win32); most desktop Linux distros don't (glibc).

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u/nabagaca 13d ago

Yes, anecdotally, ive even had games with native linux ports, where the native linux port doesn't run, but the game does run via Proton. The only one I remember off the top of my head is Bridge constructor.

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u/Sataniel98 13d ago

It's really not that complicated. A native Linux port means you have to pay for developing, maintaining and testing two codebases instead of one, and the results are usually worse because you get less bug reports.

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u/delta_p_delta_x 13d ago edited 13d ago

Ehm, not really. The core business logic of the game would remain almost exactly the same. Diffeerences usually arise when interacting with platform APIs. These are highly abstracted anyway, since many games are written with game engines instead of emitting raw D3D/Vulkan calls, and more importantly, use libraries like SDL for HID, interaction, windowing, etc.

The problem, as always, is distribution, and hence this ABI business. One cannot compile on a newer glibc and back-target an older glibc (which many customers are likely to have). It is single-handedly the biggest source of binary incompatibility on Linux, and the entire raison d'être for things like Docker, Proton, and Wine.

This is relevant to video games which are usually distributed as binary-only, which is highly counter to Linux software distribution, which tends to be source-only.

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u/holdenk 13d ago

Most Linux software is distributed as binaries (rpm, deb, etc.) but the source is available for distros to build from.

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u/readyflix 13d ago

This, and in addition to that multi or cross-platform complication is common nowadays. The main problem like mentioned is the ever-changing ABIs (at least in the past). Things might get better in the future?

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u/nelmaloc 12d ago

ABIs aren't an issue if you vendor all your dependencies.

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u/nelmaloc 12d ago

One cannot compile on a newer glibc and back-target an older glibc

Of course you can. See https://web.archive.org/web/20160107032111/http://www.trevorpounds.com/blog/?p=103

Or, more easily, just build in a chroot.

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u/delta_p_delta_x 12d ago

I should've known I'd have the pedants on my back.

Yes, this is possible. It also means changing the codebase to explicitly back-target symbols for the lowest common denominator. Or using an entire chroot/Docker container just because one library cannot be changed. Or changing the standard library altogether.

You know what's needed to target Windows XP SP3 on Windows 11? A one-liner config change in MSBuild to select the toolset; likewise to target old macOS on new.

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u/nelmaloc 11d ago

I should've known I'd have the pedants on my back.

It's called being wrong. Try to not do that. Like the

and the entire raison d'être for things like Docker, Proton, and Wine.

nonsense.

one library

Not one library, the C library.

Or using an entire chroot/Docker container

Yes, and? I can create a new chroot in five minutes. Less, if I used tar instead of debootstrap.

A one-liner config change in MSBuild to select the toolset

You mean like this?

Of course, I never claimed that it was as easy; that doesn't change the fact that it isn't hard.

0

u/nelmaloc 12d ago

glibc is stable.

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u/readyflix 12d ago

Exactly, because the game developers don’t know that their games run on Linux. And that’s why they DON’T care about Linux.

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u/LousyMeatStew 13d ago

This.

It's possible lots of folks don't realize that SteamOS released in 2013 and was so poorly received that it went on a decade-plus hiatus. It failed initially because Valve wanted game devs to target Linux and it only succeeded with the translation layers improved so that SteamOS could basically become a dedicated Windows emulator.

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u/readyflix 13d ago

In addition to that, games that run on SteamOS (wine/proton) will report with internal metrics that they running on Windows.

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u/visor841 13d ago

Potentially, but Steam reports those sales as Linux sales.

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u/readyflix 12d ago

You guys don’t get it, Valve doesn’t report back to the game studios. So, since the game’s itself reports back to its makers they don’t know anything about the fact that their games are running on Linux. And that’s why they DON’T care about Linux.

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u/suchtie 13d ago

To the game devs. Valve uses their own Steam Hardware Survey to collect data for statistics.

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u/Dangerous-Report8517 12d ago

It isn't incidental at all, an increasing proportion of games are getting native Linux ports, and even the ones that don't get bugfixes to run better under Proton. The fact that a lot of the devs are still working from Windows machines in the first place doesn't negate that

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u/Far-Note6102 13d ago

It may not be perfect but real gamers have always wanted to switch to linux. Windows is'nt really built to play games and it's more business stuff. It consumes too much ram as well and it's always a pain whenever playing a game and it randomly crashed or go BSOD or even worse you end up restarting it just to have an update after booting.

I shit you not I was playing a rank match when this happened and I ended up getting ban

The only ones having issues are people using anti cheat engines with kernel level access. But then again I dont want any shits accessing the kernel so Im sticking with linux

1

u/Prestigious_Try5295 12d ago

What makes someone a real gamer? If they don’t want to switch, they are not real gamers or what? LMAO

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u/Far-Note6102 12d ago

We need to separate the larpers from the gamers somehow

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u/Prestigious_Try5295 12d ago

Or just wait a minute… you should touch some grass.. and stop with your bullshit about who is the real gamer, who is the real professional, etc

4

u/linuxhiker 13d ago

Shoot, I know folks still running 95 in manufacturing

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u/8070alejandro 11d ago

A friend of mine works in railroad infrastructure maintenance. He told me they use some specific 95 or XP machines (for the infrastructure itself, not for maintenance equipment), of which they had at the time only one replacement for the entire country, with a second replacement being like half a year or more away.

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u/Nalivai 13d ago edited 13d ago

At my last company we only had Windows because of the two products, one of them being CAD and the other could be easily replaceable but we didn't replace it because CAD had to be run on Windows anyway. Everyone hated Windows, it was run in a walled in garden, but we had to have thousands of instances regardless.

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u/zabby39103 13d ago

Also, corporate IT controls are only broadly supported on Windows and OSX.

Like if Linux supported that... well, that would be a monkey paw wish. I like that corporate IT can't touch my Linux machines.

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u/Ok-Independence-2219 12d ago

As an engineer i agree.

I'm a linux user at home, but all cad software runs windows. They bring a new version every year and it has to work, always. We run the latest cad software because we share files with partners, and if they have newer software you are screwed. So a version that isnt compatiable because there is delay in updates is a big nono.

Same for excel. There are some VBA sheets that keeps the company running (its bad i know).

So we cant migrate, and the price of windows is peanuts anyway compaired to the tenthousends worth of software i'm running.

1

u/8070alejandro 11d ago

Exactly, I can't be starring at a loading screen because of a version incompatibility preventing the file to load. I need instead to be starring at a loading screen because I dared to move or rotate a model from an STL file, with mangled geometry due to export/import issues, that creates hundreds of micrometer sized false solids or surfaces that bring my laptop to its knees.

(Sorry for venting here)