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Comment by ghostpepper | Hacker News Reader

I know the RPi4 is more powerful than previous iterations but don't CAD programs generally require pretty beefy CPU/GPU hardware?

I was sort of hoping this post would at least mention in passing the complexity of assembly that is possible on this hardware.

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The original release of FreeCAD was in 2002. The RPi4 will handily outclass anything anybody was running it on at the time.

You have to stay in the limitations you have, but that's true on any system and always has been.

Still wondering what the use case is...I just can't see what advantage the pi would have over using FreeCAD on any typical desktop or any laptop...

I guess education? Especially given the pi is very cheap and can be used for all sorts of other things?

I think that would be it, yes. There's a lot of people for whom giving them a ~$50-100 "computer" that blows away anything I had in 2010 is still a good thing. The more real tools and programs you can get running on that, the better off they are.

They aren't running FreeCAD from 2002, they are running FreeCAD from 2020. I bet you couldn't run 2020's Firefox on a system from 2002, even though Firefox existed in 2002.

Perhaps interestingly, Firefox runs on a (Win7) system from ~2004.

Well, it did about 2-3 months ago when I found the system - an ancient Dual 3GHz Xeon (Nocona era) with 5GB of ram - and pt Win7 on it just to see if it would work.

It was even fairly usable.

Some software that needed more recent CPU instructions (~SSE something?) didn't work, but Firefox seemed ok.

Interestingly, no modern Linux distribution was able to boot. Wouldn't even get into the installer. FreeNAS 11.2.<something> booted and worked fine.

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