this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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Solidworks, Fusion360, Altium, and a few others
I refuse to use Fusion360 because of what Autodesk did to Eagle (and my forever licence)
Autodesk are awful.
I hate it too. I use it to generate gcode for my CNC milling machine. Yes, Solidworks can also do that but it has a much steeper learning curve.
Pretty sure FreeCAD can also do that using the CAM workbench
Fusion360 actively attempts to block wine usage so you have to use a VM (or a single application VM like Winboat) for it to play ball. I haven't had experience with any of the others though.
How does winboat work?
Makes a container windows install.
Do you have to see if the application you want to host is supported, or is it pretty compatible?
There are some windows softwares i want to run, but they don't work in wine.
Its a full VM so the main downside is that GPU acceleration is 0 but you have full CPU speeds.
Also expect the VM to eat the typical 60gb + the applications of storage
Solid Edge is what had me keeping a Win10 instance for a while, but finally gave up on it after the OS kept corrupting itself. Started learning Onshape instead, which is web based and works under Linux. It's a passable replacement for doing basic 3d sketches.
Could we find Open Source alternatives? I've gotten good use of blender for these but I don't know your use cases
Blender is world class, but the CAD softwares are leagues behind, unfortunately.
Whilst FreeCAD certainly doesn't have feature parity with things like Creo, I firmly believe it is good enough for most people. I switched to only using that for all my contract work and personal projects and it's generally been fine
That's awesome! Do you have any videos you'd recommend for someone getting into it?
I wish there were open source alternatives to Autocad, but freecad is doing its own thing and as someone who uses Autocad as part of her career it's so much easier to keep a partition for when I need to throw something together than to learn how to make freecad work
Very different use case. I make parts to 3D print and CNC mill. Lots of brackets and other mechanical parts.