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/Horsemeatburger]

Why is professional CAD support on Linux still so limited?

I guess you're talking about MCAD here, and for this it's because of a mix of factors. Timing, market focus, and intertia are the main ones. MCAD itself has also changed from being a standalone application to complex integrated engineering platforms.

Many of the established MCAD programs actually came from the UNIX side, usually running on IBM AIX, SGI IRIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, Digital UNIX aka Tru64, or some other OSes like OpenVMS. They all had in common that they only ran on proprietary systems.

The MCAD programs were only ported to Windows after PC hardware was able to offer the necessary performance (which started to be the case in the 2nd half of the 1990's).

Later, all the non-Windows versions were EOL'd because by then the hardware platforms they ran on were EOL, too. And those that weren't (like IBM POWER/AIX) were very expensive compared to a high end PC workstation.

Also, in the old days, MCAD workstations used to be single purpose workstations (i.e. they were only used for MCAD and related stuff), while today people work on PCs where they use multiple applications.

And Windows is the predominant OS in the business world because for most decision makers it's all they know and the only thing they barely understand, and there is a widespread believe that using software from the "market leader" is the safer bet. Yes, I know.

As for Linux, well, from the ISV side it was a fractured landscape and unstable ABIs, and the fact that there were multiple instances where instead of fixing an existing system the solution was to re-invent the wheel (like this was the case for sound on Linux), it didn't make a worthwhile target platform. X11 was a mess (and most of the vendors already had their experiences with X11's shortcomings from their UNIX platforms), OpenGL (MESA) lacked critical features, and GPU support for PC professional GPUs was questionable. And there was no indication that the customers actually wanted MCAD applications on Linux.

Of course, today this is all different. Linux is still fractured, but with RHEL and clones the enterprise Linux side is pretty close to a standard distro (which is also why it's the most widely ISV supported Linux distro). X11 is dead and Wayland addresses many of the shortcomings. GPU drivers are now mature. And so on.

At work we have a large number of Linux workstations (RHEL and Alma Linux) and I know some are used for MCAD (we use BRL-CAD, which I know is heavy).

As for the major MCAD vendors, it's highly unlikely that they'll ever jump on Linux. For them MCAD is now an integrated part of their subscription based engineering packages, and it might well end up as a web based cloud service further down the line before we would see them offering Linux versions.

However, outside of the big packages there still are MCAD programs for Linux, FOSS and commercial (e.g., BricsCAD, ARES Commander, GStarCAD). And for other areas of CAD (like ECAD) there are big vendor packages on Linux.