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Comment by jhloa2 | Hacker News Reader

I hate what Autodesk has become. I'm in the A&E industry and Revit has become a monstrosity of a monopoly. The industry as a whole has seen decent revenue growth, but almost no profit because Autodesk is siphoning it all into their coffers [1]. I wouldn't mind too much, but you don't really get any benefit from their new subscription model. They release very few new features with every release and there's bugs in their software I've been dealing with since 2016. There are some software alternatives but it's very difficult to get a whole design team on board with trying something new.

[1] https://letters-to-autodesk.com/letter-to-autodesk.pdf

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I don't know the industry that well, but do use Fusion 360 and am annoyed by them. I think they have this problem where people that make money by doing CAD use Solidworks, and so only hobbyists want their products, and hobbyists don't have any money. Thus they are having to tighten the screws on hobbyists to stay in business, and it just doesn't work, because like I said... hobbyists don't have any money. You can't get blood from a stone, no matter how hard you try.

I have been tempted to buy it, honestly, but it's a little bit too expensive. I use it for 3D printing, not milling, so I don't feel like I should have to pay for those features. So instead, I am gritting my teeth for the day that I have to jump to some open-source CAD tool, which will be annoying to relearn, but ultimately probably not a big deal after I pick what to use.

If you (or anyone reading this) goes for freecad and gets stuck on something, just know that at this point it's to be expected but there are many people online (myself included, email's in my profile) who are happy to help. You can generally make what you need in freecad as long as it's simple but the learning curve is terrible. You might think you have a dozen ways to make a part (and in other cad packages that would indeed be the case) but there are only two that'll actually work. It's an incredibly frustrating software package but at least you're not at the mercy of an inevitable autodesk screw tightening.

Oh good to know. I have only used FreeCAD to make simple gears to 3d print and found it an relatively easy experience (compared to Blender). Can't relate to power user frustration yet if I ever do, it's good to know there are people I can reach out to. Thanks in advance.

Is there a good AutoCAD alternative for linux (FOSS)? Haven't worked with *CAD a lot, but probably will have to in near future (long story), and i need some basic cad drawings.

LibreCAD is the closest I've found for my use case. I strictly used AutoCAD for making architectural floorplans. I used the relative ("@") command heavily and LibreCAD has the same feature. The UI also feels somewhat similar. LibreCAD still lacks powerful grouping and block functions, and text could be better when compared to AutoCAD's DTEXT/MTEXT. It's one of those FOSS projects that feels like there's a lot of potential, similar to Blender before its big overhaul last year.

Not foss, but for basic solid modeling CAD, I've had a nice experience w/ OnShape

open Cascade (with python) worked for me

I've been hating Autodesk since they killed Softimage. For a while I moved to modo but the Foundry is beginning to look more and more like Autodesk for anything that isn't Nuke. Today I'm a happy Houdini and Blender and sometimes Cinema 4D

Yeah it’s a real problem for the industry. Revit has become this “standard” but its totally closed without running their systems. Something really needs to give.

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