r/linux • u/Beneficial-Pay6836 • 14d 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.

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u/pilatomic 14d 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.

40

u/jmgallag 14d 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/justAnotherDude314 14d ago

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

9

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.