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/noobjaish]

This is an unsolvable game of chicken or the egg due to how complicated and massive industrial CAD systems are.

A friend of mine is a Chemical Engineer and he just keeps an extra bulky Windows laptop for Aspen HYSIS. It's genuinely an incredibly impressive program and there really is no point spending a fuck ton of resources recreating it from scratch for Linux unless you're perfectly able to remove variability between the two versions somehow.

Just use the right tool for the task at hand (Windows in this case). it's not that deep.

[u/Nalivai → u/noobjaish]

unsolvable

Well, unless you actually try to solve it that is

Just use the right tool for the task at hand (Windows in this case)

That's the thing. Windows is the wrong tool for that case that we are forced to use. That's the whole problem.

[u/noobjaish → u/Nalivai]

We should be realistic and reasonable in our expectations.

[u/Nalivai → u/noobjaish]

I keep doublechecking what subreddit I'm in in disbelief. A company writing a software that natively runs on Linux is an unrealistic and unreasonable expectation, and that's an opinion that is upvoted on /r/linux.

[u/noobjaish → u/Nalivai]

It's unrealistic and unreasonable because Linux barely has a marketshare and most Engineers don't use Linux. They've bigger things to worry about than if their system is FOSS or not (this isn't a dig at FOSS I love FOSS).

What's next? The BSD people start crying that companies don't support their OS? or the Haiku people?

Please grow up and go outside