Hacker News Reader

Comment by craftinator | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call it an abomination. Bloated, yes, full of little quirks, true, but I can sit down, design a CAD model with multiple components, simulate it's motion and stress points, fix any interferences, lay out the parts in a technical drawing, 3d print half of it, and CNC mill the rest, all in the space of 2 hours. In fact I just did that this morning, from 5 AM starting a design, to 7 AM, now, when I just finished pulling parts out of the mill.

It's ridiculously powerful, and the cost is about 1 cup of coffee per day. I'm running it on an $800 laptop that's a year old, and it's snappy. My biggest complaint is lack of Linux support, which is abominable since Linux is the most widely used OS on the planet, but what can you do?

View on HN

Yeah, I agree. Sometimes weird, but the fact remains that with a bit of thought I can design a piece of furniture, and then with parametric measurement make small tweaks at the end so I can easily work off the materials that I have. E.g I can design a part to be .75” thick, but if the finished planed mahogany I have is .747c I just update the piece and my joints still work!

The CAM works, the simulations work, the assemblies work. It’s Cheap for what it is. I don’t even touch the sculpt, electronics, or sheet metal workspaces and those are included!

My personal bugbear is that the rotary 4th axis cam is so expensive.

>My biggest complaint is lack of Linux support, which is abominable since Linux is the most widely used OS on the planet, but what can you do?

Linux is not the most widely used desktop OS - that is windows by a long shot and that is the segment that matters here. Why would a software maker invest the time and effort in catering to a negligible slice of the desktop OS market?

UNIX once dominated CAD/CAM/CAE and was never a strong name on the desktop. Robustness, security and stability are valuable features for such market. Ignoring linux today for technical tools shows a lack of vision or unportable low quality legacy code.

"desktop OS" is not what I said, it's what you inferred. Linux is the base for every Android device, and most servers run some flavor of it, most routers run it, most widely used system for embedded OS, the list goes on. I meant precisely what I said.

> Why would a software maker invest the time and effort in catering to a negligible slice of the desktop OS market?

Why indeed? I disagree with "negligible" here, but for any sort of advanced and automated workflow, Linux is the best choice.

OP meant that ironically...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com