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
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.
I use Sonar from Steelseries since I have one of their headsets. It does work for other headsets too, afaik it’s windows only though.
Any audiochannel mixing software that has an input (and output for microphone) should work. The main thing is to not let discord touch the device directly basically.
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.
Nah, it is not the bloat.
Windows sucks. Linux is much better. Keep using Linux and you’ll see it.