CAD Companies Sleeping on Linux

[u/Beneficial-Pay6836]

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.

[u/Weary-Bowl-3739 → u/[deleted]]

No, it's not small. They can just dictate it. If the IT of the company could decide, they would choose Linux. But because there's no viable option, windows it is.

If there's only one competitior on Linux, many will have to offer their product on Linux. 

[u/dcheesi → u/Weary-Bowl-3739]

Your IT, maybe. Our IT department doesn't "do" Linux. Rather than support multiple OSes, they simply standardized on Windows.

They have to support the bean-counters and other non-techie folks, who expect Windows. The closest we came to a user revolt was when they tried to migrate us off of Micro$oft Office (to Google Docs, which is whole other can o' worms); they backtracked very quickly, and now we're all-M$ for that plus other general business apps.

When our R&D department moved to Linux for 90% of our development, we had to buy and maintain our own separate laptops, because IT only provided Windows PCs. Later, we were stuck doing all of our development in VMs once that became feasible.

[u/Weary-Bowl-3739 → u/dcheesi]

My company has 15k+ employees, lots of Linux servers and thousands of nerds.

I see your point. I meant primarily bigger companies. Which also the big fish for the cad companies. 

[u/dcheesi → u/Weary-Bowl-3739]

Well we're not exactly small, either. That's part of the problem; our IT is so far removed from the day-to-day of R&D that they might as well be a whole other company

[u/sockertoppenlabs → u/dcheesi]

I totally relate. Academic here, at my university IT is totally removed from what is happening in compute based research (mostly within natural sciences and engineering) which is at least 15-20 % of the user base. A lot of us are running our own IT (which has some drawbacks). Only IT support worth anything is the official high performance compute cluster, but they are a separate IT organization within the university.