CAD machines are some of the few in our company that are staying windows instead of going to Linux. We're an autodesk shop, I tested fusion under Debian 6 months ago and it didn't work very well. I tried proton and wine, couldn't get either to work great and had issues. It would launch, but opening a medium complexity assembly was laggy, and the CAM module would crash fairly often. I can't speak for other programs from personal experience though.

That said, for home use freecad has gotten a lot better after the ondsel changes were merged, I was using the free liscence of fusion360 for personal projects, and moved over to freecad 6 months ago. I'd originally tried it 7 or 8 years ago, and it was just absolutely awful to use, but modern versions are really very good. There wasn't a huge learning curve, and I haven't run into anything that the program can't do. For hobby CAD, I'm using it for 3d printing, a Cnc mill, and making prints for manual machining. Honestly, I've been less frustrated with freecad than fusion360, it does a better job of getting out of my way and letting me design things. That said, I'm a software dev and IT guy, I don't know if it would work for commercial use. I certainly didn't push for the engineers to change, but their workstations are already running win11 that I had to debloat.

Here's a list of CAD application and their ratings on AppDB: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=category&i...

Just run it in a windows vm for just that use, there's great ways to make this almost seamless in linux. works better than win/etc.

CAD applications usually require graphics acceleration. I've tried to make Fusion 360 work on linux using VMware, VirtualBox and GNOME Boxes – performance was unacceptably bad.

You could do KVM GPU passthrough

worked great for me using virtualizaation

What's the point of putting it in a VM? That doesn't get rid of Windows, which was the whole point.

It’s often more a question of “will the vendor support it” than “can it run.”

Vendor support is mostly useless at the best of times. I'm more interested in 'can it run'.

Not really.

On linux, you have OpenSCAD (which is okay for some applications) and you have FreeCAD (which sucks imo). Right now, I just use OnShape which works in my web browser and is similar to SOLIDWORKS (and it's $0 for students).

In the future I will try running windows CAD under linux using kvm and this: https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary

Just use Windows lol

I need to use both. It's easier for me to run windows in kvm than it is to run linux in WSL. (And more reliable in the long run, because I don't have to deal with changing windows update shenanigans)