Title basically.
One of my windows computers, which happens to be the one I happen to do the most CAD work on, can’t upgrade to windows 11 due to having an Ivy Bridge era Xenon (it’s an E5-1680 v2 for the curious, older used workstations are fantastic bang for the buck computers).
Switching to Linux on this computer has been in the cards for a while, but I hadn’t been in a hurry to do it. Looks like my hand might be getting forced…
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Yes and no. This install script works well, but it breaks every few months (not the fault of the script, but Autodesk). Then you have to wait for an update and reinstall everything.
The second link to this repo, thanks!
When you say it breaks every few months does that mean that fusion does its usual update thing as-per-normal and then just nopes out one day?
The main function of the script is to enable the browser redirect for the login. Sometimes Autodesk changes how the login works and logs you out. Then you can’t login back again, because the browser redirect doesn’t work.
Answering the title: No. Never heard of anyone who had.
Embrace Freecad or succumb to windows/macos
After exploring options such as Fusion360 and SOLIDWORKS I ended up making a free account on onshape. It’s web-based and works flawlessly on Firefox and Linux. I should try a bit more FreeCAD, but lack motivation.
Freecad has gotten much better with the recent updates.
It’s UI is (obviously) different than fusion, but so are other CAD programs.
Sure, it may not be at the stage where it could be used to do 100% of the mechanical and electrical design on a jet helicopter, but how many people need that level of complexity for their projects?
Better, but it’s still pretty shit.
OnShape is just waiting to be enshittified
You’ll need to get used to many new things when switching to Linux. Changing to FreeCAD could as well be one of those
It will be frustrating, and it will take some time to get used to but honestly it’s worth it. If not for anything else then to flex your brain cells and keep them nimble
I’ve dabbled in Linux in the past and spend the majority of my time popping between windows and mac os. I also spend a decent amount of time in powershell/terminal, but largely in the context of work.
I’m not against investing the time learn new things, but time is very scarse these days with two younger kids.
My modeling workflow is often iterative and fusion’s timeline makes it very easy to edit a feature from way back when and then propagate that change through all subsequent steps that reference that feature. You can also add entirely new features and then update the next step in the timeline to reference them. The last time I looked at alternatives this either wasn’t supported or was fickle, but based on some comments in this post that may have changed. I’ll have to give FreeCAD a try.
I think it’s called parametric design right?, freeCAD suppports this but I have heard that there is a bug when trying to edit shapes with filet I think?
Yes, this approach is called parametric design. FreeCAD struggled with the topological naming problem for quite some time, which basically means that internally named things, and references to them, can break under certain situations. Exposure to this problem increased as the thing getting molded became more complicated, which seemed maddening from a user’s perspective. It seems like it may have been fixed in the main branch somewhat recently, which I was not aware of. That’s good news.
They have since released V1 that seems to be pretty solid. Still not 100% but for a free software it is a very useful tool that gets most jobs done
It’s about as good as Tinkercad.
Oh no. Way better that Tinkercad if you ask me. I have already been able to make way more complicated shapes and designs than I had ever thought possible with Tinkercad
Does FreeCAD do CAM too?
It has a dedicated CAM workbench yeah
Here are some YouTube tutorials for CAM in freeCAD https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaUEbWaf2rhSGcjQK9LYuL4PkV1GzjeIY
And the CAM category on the freeCAD wiki https://wiki.freecad.org/Category:CAM
I tried it some time ago and it was pretty usable, I reckon it is only better now.
I think I remember people saying they got it working with this
https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
That being said, stuff like Fusion 360 changes quite often and even if it works now it might break compatibility with the future update.
FreeCAD has come a long way since with the 1.0 release and the 1.1 release also has lots of good quality of life improvements.
Fusion360 has been rated Silver on WINE (windows compatability tool) so you have a decent shot of running it. Silver means “couple of minor bugs, might need tweaks to run but runs well”.
In Linux we have FreeCAD but if you’re heavily dependent on Fusion360 I’d recommend trying a Virtual Windows Machine, Bottles, Lutris, Steam Proton, the installation script posted here and so on.
If you have space for two drives on your computer then worst case you could bypass the windows whatever and have two different OSs.
This, maybe with something with good wine/gpu compatibility like CachyOs. And if it fails there are ways to install windows 11 on IvyBridge
I just normally end up using Onshape
No luck. I use OnShape.
This has been my experience. I couldn’t even get logged in to Fusion via Bottles.
You really shouldn’t connect win10 machines to the Internet at some points. Legacy shit is fine and fun. But don’t go shaking hands with danger.
I tried to make Fusion 360 run under wine and just couldn’t get it reliably working.
There were problems logging in, problems with resolution, issues with fonts and DLL errors. It just wasn’t stable enough to rely on.
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welp, looks like I won’t be using fusion when I inevitably need some design program on my personal computer again
