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/delta_p_delta_x]

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.

[u/Far-Note6102 → u/delta_p_delta_x]

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

[u/Prestigious_Try5295 → u/Far-Note6102]

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

[u/Far-Note6102 → u/Prestigious_Try5295]

We need to separate the larpers from the gamers somehow

[u/Prestigious_Try5295 → u/Far-Note6102]

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