I am about to go to college for engineering and they require a Windows laptop because of the software we will be using (mostly solidworks I’m pretty sure) doesn’t work on other operating systems. I primarily use windows day-to-day for gaming and such anyways so it’s not a problem for me but I’m wondering if anyone had experience using solidworks or any other industry-class CAD software like Inventor on linux
I personally use FreeCad. But for school you are probably SOL.
If you absolutely need non wine compatible software on your machine you’ll need to:
Dualboot if you care for power
Use a VM if you don’t care for the additional overhead
try wine and see what happens
See if your school has labs for this, might be easier and the computer might be faster than your laptop.
Personally I’ll just use windows since I don’t mind it that much, although even in my few weeks using it on the laptop I got windows 11 is significantly worse than 10, been having some goofy audio mixing issues. I do kinda want to try it on wine tho just for the hell of it and see what happens.
It’s a fun rabbit hole, and you’ll be surprise what works.
If you do try, Lutris is my go to tool to install and manage windows programs. That way you can try different versions of wine/proton.
However there’s a reason my main rig still runs Windows. I have Moonlight and Sunshine installed on it so I can remote access windows in my house.
Do you thing 3dstudio would work in a VM?
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=318
According to winedb no. Or at least garbage. That being said it was tested with an old version of wine, so who knows. Maybe it’ll work now.
@astropenguin5 @the16bitgamer
This is exactly why schools should teach general concepts vs specific software, FOSS or not.
If a student is more comfortable producing their works in Blender than a ““proper”” CAD program, I see no issue. Each concept is covered in detail by the instructor, the end product assigned, and students then have to choose which software they want to invest their efforts learning, given the allotted time.
This approach would have the bonus of providing the student with not only the freedom of choice, but also its inherent burden. They would also be forced to learn how to learn, which is something that is being forgotten more often with each new technological advancement.
From my experience this should be the difference between University and College, but since OP never stated which program they were in, I presumed either the later or a pad prof in uni.
I remember while in Uni doing a Film and TV as well as a Game design course. We used industry tools like Game Maker and Premier Pro. But the skills we learnt had nothing to do with the programs. We just needed to show how to apply them in those software. I moved from Game Maker to Unity after the course.