I am about to go to college for engineering and they require a Windows laptop because of the software we will be using (mostly solidworks I’m pretty sure) doesn’t work on other operating systems. I primarily use windows day-to-day for gaming and such anyways so it’s not a problem for me but I’m wondering if anyone had experience using solidworks or any other industry-class CAD software like Inventor on linux
I only use onshape. It’s all web based so it works with any OS.
I personally use FreeCad. But for school you are probably SOL.
If you absolutely need non wine compatible software on your machine you’ll need to:
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Dualboot if you care for power
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Use a VM if you don’t care for the additional overhead
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try wine and see what happens
See if your school has labs for this, might be easier and the computer might be faster than your laptop.
@astropenguin5 @the16bitgamer
This is exactly why schools should teach general concepts vs specific software, FOSS or not.If a student is more comfortable producing their works in Blender than a ““proper”” CAD program, I see no issue. Each concept is covered in detail by the instructor, the end product assigned, and students then have to choose which software they want to invest their efforts learning, given the allotted time.
This approach would have the bonus of providing the student with not only the freedom of choice, but also its inherent burden. They would also be forced to learn how to learn, which is something that is being forgotten more often with each new technological advancement.
From my experience this should be the difference between University and College, but since OP never stated which program they were in, I presumed either the later or a pad prof in uni.
I remember while in Uni doing a Film and TV as well as a Game design course. We used industry tools like Game Maker and Premier Pro. But the skills we learnt had nothing to do with the programs. We just needed to show how to apply them in those software. I moved from Game Maker to Unity after the course.
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Don’t bother with FreeCAD. You are not a hobbyist, capitalist society is already cruel enough without you shooting yourself in the foot with weaker software.
As an Electrical Engineer I use GStarCAD (AutoCAD clone), it runs well on Wine. There are a few pre-cracked versions on 1337, some of them do not work well. I run it on Bottles on Flatpak.
Could you be studying Mechanical Engineering perhaps? Just dual boot for that. You should give up any attempt at getting those programs to run on Linux. You could use a virtual machine but you’d need a powerful computer.
Yep I’m doing mechanical engineering, and already like doing CAD on solidworks and have experience on it already so there’s no way I’m going to switch anytime soon. This post really wasnt intended to be trying to find how to run it on Linux, more just to see if it’s even remotely possible out of curiosity.
My current plan is to just run raw windows 11 on the Dell Precision 3571 that I got recently, I don’t use Linux nearly enough on my dual booted PC to warrant putting it on my laptop too, even though the PC will stay at home for the time being
Don’t dual boot latest Windows, use 10, ideally the LTSC version but it’s a taad harder to “acquire” and set up.
Latest will always have too many updates and moving parts. W11 also has much more crap running in the background which might be an issue if you’re running heavy software on weaker hardware.
Yeah my current setup is far from ideal, my laptop is pretty solid though, it’s better than my PC. Win 11 is kinda sucky from the few weeks I’ve been using it though
I tried it for a while to satiate my inner nerd’s curiosity and I liked it though, still worse than Linux on both technical and moral grounds however.
Yeah for the most part it is fine, it’s just given me some weird problems I haven’t had before, not sure if windows is to blame or the computer itself. For some reason whenever I am playing a game on steam and also in a voice call on discord the game audio will get cut out and/or distorted a lot of the time. The overall complaints are of course being somewhat bloated and morals.
That is discord being sucky. Have had that problem a lot with various headphones, only thing that helped for me was using another software to manage things.
As for your actual question, my father has worked as a mechanical engineer for a few decades (recently retired) and after the major players did switch to only windows (they used unix in earlier days) he always had a dualboot system at home just for CAD work.
Yeah that’s a little what i suspected, it’s worked fine on win 10 with the exact same setup thoughm What other software did you find that worked? And was something to replace discord or just help with audio mixing?
For the CAD, that’s pretty much what I expected and definitely seems to be the overall conclusion.
