111–120 of 235 posts
Time to invest the comparable amount of money in FOSS alternatives? FreeCAD, LibreCAD, BRL-CAD, and so on.
Thank god there's Blender so 3D artists don't have to pay the ridiculous price for 3ds max and Maya. (Why the hell was Autodesk allowed to buy Maya?)
What is the best (affordable!) CAD software for a hobbyist with no experience? I was recently looking into this and the leading software was like 6,000 USD a year per seat.
Subscriptions are a scam. I am actively consolidating my payments and shifting to next best alternatives that give me one time pay options or open source and contributing there.
But seriously, calling subscription a "scam" is very delusional. It seems like you have not released a product/saas. I support your effort in supporting and contributing to opensource though.
Just a reminder that Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world, and this is just the way they always operated.
> Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world So many things come to mind with that one sentence, it's mesmerizing. I don't have a lot of direct exposure to Oracle, but I remember grief with Adobe and Autodesk products dating back to the 80s. My dad's company was light manufacturing. They used AutoCAD for various things and my dad became proficient enough that he started wanting to use it for various projects at ho…
Time to invest the comparable amount of money in FOSS alternatives? FreeCAD, LibreCAD, BRL-CAD, and so on.
I'm with you in the spirit of hurting Autodesk, but the FOSS alternatives, while able to produce a similar product, simply use different metaphors and concepts then F360/Inventor/etc do. It's not like the switch from WinRAR to 7-Zip, it's a long ordeal of the (possibly already overloaded) designer learning how to do everything over again. There is very little carry-over aside from general design knowledge; and it may…
FreeCAD uses OpenCASCADE, because it's the only free option. You will notice that almost no other 3D Program, paid or free, uses it. OpenCASCADE is, compared to Parasolid or ACIS; buggy, broken, incomplete, unergonomic, and obsolete. There is almost no commercial software that uses it - they all find it better to license Parasolid or ACIS despite the heavy royalties those packages require.
This puts FreeCAD in kind of a chicken-or-egg situation. The geometry kernel they use is considered unanimously inferior to the licensed kernels for almost every task, to the point that even people building new CAD programs (like the recent Plasticity beta) don't even consider it as an option. The 3D packages that license the kernels think that rebuilding ~35 years of work with extremely complex math equations requiring dozens, or even hundreds, of PhD-level math professors is too much work to justify not paying a license fee. To them, it's like saying we should rebuild Windows, but it's PhD-level math instead of APIs.
Time to invest the comparable amount of money in FOSS alternatives? FreeCAD, LibreCAD, BRL-CAD, and so on.
I'm with you in the spirit of hurting Autodesk, but the FOSS alternatives, while able to produce a similar product, simply use different metaphors and concepts then F360/Inventor/etc do. It's not like the switch from WinRAR to 7-Zip, it's a long ordeal of the (possibly already overloaded) designer learning how to do everything over again. There is very little carry-over aside from general design knowledge; and it may…
I'm sure it's unrealistic for a small design house to do it on their own, but that doesn't mean the industry couldn't band together.
I wonder what would happen if everyone donated 10% of their Autodesk licensing fees to a foundation, or if a big shop decided to hire a dozen autodesk veterans for a few years.
What is the best (affordable!) CAD software for a hobbyist with no experience? I was recently looking into this and the leading software was like 6,000 USD a year per seat.
Check out onshape.com, it's similar to fusion360 and is quite good for hobbyists. I use it for parts I need to 3D print.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a challenge. Look at Linux vs Windows. Modern distros are a drop in replacement for Windows, minus the user hostility, yet people continue with Windows because change is hard, not to mention matching everyone else. So, even if OSS CAD became a drop in replacement for Autodesk, there's gotta be something extra to truly bite at Autodesk.
Which distributions? I switched some of my machines due to the increasing user hostility in Windows, but found it a big pain in the ass, even as a developer. And that's not even considering how many programs/games will only work on Windows.
I have for years used different flavors of Ubuntu and Arch, but must admit, I always had some issues, no matter the distro. Mind you, purely counting the problems, the amount was either comparable or slightly less than what I tended to encounter on Windows installs, but still, I get that adding any issues on top of less familiarity and lower software compatibility is a hard sell for the average person.
Then, I tried Fedora, more specifically Silverblue, for the first time in a while and was blown away. Everything worked. More to the point, I could not break the install even when actively trying to. Software was bleeding edge but stable, the kernel the most current version without issues, immutability prevents even the most idiotic mistake on the user's part, no update ever caused any issue. The concurrent rise of Proton and Bottles for Games made it even more appealing.
Then, something followed that would cement my reverence for Silverblue: At the time, I had recently gotten an AMD Renoir based laptop. Silverblue ran perfectly, GPU acceleration, sleep, connectivity, all out of the box as if the notebook had been designed for Fedora.
Still, I made a Windows install as a fallback. Unlike with Silverblue which, thanks to Kernel support for the GPU, needed no additional configuration, Windows of course required drivers from AMD. Upon installing them, I quickly noticed crashes, instability and resolution issues. Turned out, Windows update had overwritten the newest driver I had installed with an older, incompatible version. No problem, I thought, annoying and not something one should have to troubleshoot on a for-profit OS, but manageable. Used DDU to remove that, installed the current driver, again, overwritten by Windows Update. Repeated the process, this time manually blacklisting the specific update. Still, that got consistently and painfully reset every time there was an update.
I understand that not everyone believes in having full control over their system. I also understand that delivering drivers via Windows Update is a valuable tool for some people. But if those drivers are faulty, taking away any graphics acceleration and causing crashes and you take away my ability to address that issue by overwriting my changes, I have a hard time seeing my money well spent at Microsoft.
Since then, I have migrated away from Windows entirely. It helps that I prefer single player story driven experiences and rhythm games, both being well covered by Proton thanks to the general lack of AntiCheat.
Aside from my Fedora systems, I have a MBP, but Ventura has its pain points as well. Simply, nothing has ever been as rock solid as Fedora Silverblue and, as much as Red Hat is currently heading in the wrong direction[1], I have to give them credit for Silverblue and Fedora Workstation. Those continue to prove more stable than anything I have ever experienced with Windows, macOS or any other Linux distro, regardless of hardware.
[0] https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripp...