One of the major reasons why using Linux on a desktop system is unsuitable for many is due to the lack of Linux support for many major applications, including Autodesk Fusion 360. Naturally, using Wine this should be easy in an ideal world, but realistically getting something like Fusion 360 set up and ready to log in with Wine will take some serious time. Fortunately [Steve Zabka] created some shell scripts to automate the process. As demonstrated by [Tech Dregs] on YouTube, this seems to indeed work on a Fedora system, with just a few glitches.
Among these glitches are some rendering artefacts like application controls remaining on the desktop after closing the application, in-application line rendering and [Tech Dregs] was unable to switch from the DirectX 9 renderer to the DirectX 11 one. Since Fusion 360 will soon drop DirectX 9 and OpenGL support, this would seem to be rather an important detail. The GitHub project seems to indicate that this should work, but [Tech Dregs] reported only getting a black screen after switching.
Clearly, using applications like Fusion 360 on Linux isn’t quite what you’d want to use for a production workflow in a commercial setting (even ignoring lack of Autodesk support), but it could be useful for students and others who’d like to not switch to Windows or MacOS just to use this kind of software for a course or hobbyist use.
Or you could just use FreeCAD.
FreeCAD is so bad I’d rather use Windows than FreeCAD.
FreeCAD is free and unencumbered. It will always get better. Fusion will only get more restricted. Luckily for you, you have a choice.
Non-sequitur. There are a lot of dead and buried projects that were “free and unencumbered” — open-source isn’t some magical guarantee against a project dying.
There are lots of commercial products which failed or which intentions have even become downright nefarious over time. From the ubiquitous “we keep your data hostage to extort more payments, to anti-virus software turning into spyware or worse. Autodesk has always been near the worst side of the scale, with buying up lots of competitors, just to eliminate them. With fusion 360 they had a “free” version, which attracted lots of interest by short sighted people. By the time it started working properly they increasingly crippled the free version. I saw it coming from the beginning, never used it. In the end they just poked all their beta testers in the rear end for all their efforts.
But the last 10+ years the whole scale has been shifting towards the dark side. I rather donate to FOSS software, than spend a single dime on commercial software. FreeCAD has become quite capable and usable over the last few years, and although progress is still quite slow, it also seems to be accelerating. I hope they do well now they have reached V1.0.
The beauty of it being free is if/when it becomes better than Fusion 360 switching to it will only require the bare minimum when someone switches software and no costs or terrible license agreements.
For right now, however, I don’t blame anyone that uses Fusion 360 instead.
I prefer FreeCAD for almost 90% DIY projects. It’s very fast and has intuitive ui. Never success to run Fusion in Linux (wine/arch), tried 3-4 times.
To call freecad UI intuitive is to say war is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
It’s is, really. You have everything you need on a toolbar. Yep, sometimes you need more, but it’s easy to find out such options even without googling. Freecad has a lot of other problems like brokeable fillets or strange pipes on complex figures, but Fusion has some of them too.
Any UI becomes intuitive if you take time to learn it. Think of Blender or, as said, FreeCAD. Sure, Fusion360 is probably more “lego” or “clay artist” friendly, but as a CAD package, there is some industry way of doing and FreeCAD tries to map to it.
Nobody going to add “ignorance is strength”?
Philistines.
I have spent more time than I could justify cursing FreeCAD as a regular user, and switching to FreeCAD 1.0 has been a breath of fresh air. It’s so much better, the tiny voice telling me to get a dedicated windows laptop just for Fusion is now quiet, hopefully for good :) give it a try if you haven’t yet.
True. FreeCAD is amazing for a not very cpmlex projects. Yep, it requires more organization from you and a little learn. But it really not as bad as you can imagine.
When did you last try it?
I’ve found it to be exceptional.
Genuinely curious: Have you used Fusion 360 much?
To be clear, I wasn’t making a comparative argument about the merits of FreeCad vs Fusion 360. I’ve never used 360, and therefore have no opinion of it… except to say that the reason I’ve never explored Fusion is because I have no interest in having my work held hostage to expensive commercial software licenses.
On the other hand FreeCad is indeed free, and I’ve used it numerous times, including for at least one very large and very complicated project. Fusion may be great, maybe not, but FreeCad is nowhere near as bad as @WereCatf would have you believe.
For me, if there is any downside, it’s that FreeCad has changed (improved) so much recently that I’ll likely have to relearn some of the workflow/tool-benches before I can use it again.
When’s the last time you used FreeCAD. It has been massively improved, especially that it’s currently on it’s 1.0 release candidate.
It WAS difficult to use. Anything that I used to do in fusion I can completely do in freecad now.
Up until a few months ago I’d have been with you on that, but since the 1.0 release I’ve found it to actually be good enough to be useful. There’s still a few things that work in an odd way, coming from Fusion, and a few features I miss, but it’s overall become manageable. At least, for my use case as a hobbyist interested in 3d printing.
Could? Should! What is wrong with HAD these days, neglecting their FOSS and FOSH roots.
How about Onshape on Linux?
Works flawlessly on an of my browsers on Linux
“cloud” based software only is an instant dead stop.
Not even worth considering.
I have made a handful of drawings in FreeCAD that I want to keep private for now, as I think they may have commercial value to build a company around. To have a “private” space at onshape costs USD1500 per year. That would have cost me around USD9000 to keep those drawings private or not loose access to them. I’m very glad I invested the time to learn FreeCAD back then.
Which is fair enough when you have a small business use case and the value you put on your designs falls into the hole between the tiers. But that doesn’t mean it should be an automatic “no” for everyone.
For hobbyists and other people who don’t care about their designs being public, it is a seriously brilliant tool. And it’s not just “people can download your files”, everything becomes a massive sketch, part and assembly library you can draw from at a fine level in a very ergonomic way. I don’t even have to put effort into curating a part library because every part in every document is automatically one search away. And since the recalculation is done in the cloud as well, you can run it on nearly anything, not just a beast machine with a high-end GPU.
There’s always the risk that it could go up in smoke at any time, but I’ve been using it since 2016 and all signs point to them being around (and sticking with their licensing policy) for the long haul.
That said, I’m cheering FreeCAD on, having it exist and continue to improve is an unqualified good.
I bit the bullet a few years ago, ditched Fusion and learned FreeCAD.
MangoJelly has brilliant tutorials: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc3UYXXfSglVpfWdX31F-e5S
There are those who need hand holding to learn. Fusion can do that. FreeCAD, does not have the hand holding aspect, so, it takes an effort that many are unwilling to invest. And, there are some things Fusion, having a multi-million dollar budget and salaried engineers, is going to do better.
I won’t say that, that’s pretty elitist. FreeCAD is great, 1.0 is even too good, but let’s be honest, Fusion is more polished and this talks to people.
However, the little gap doesn’t justify this hack and begging to use Fusion to the lord Autodesk.
Don’t listen to these ‘P’rofessionals talking about time value, downplaying not-state-on-there stuff (to reassure themselves) and not even giving solution/help while being on a freaking hobbyist/maker website.
multi-million dollar budget and salaried engineers only get you so far. Open-source does not have such limitations.
You don’t need hand holding to use Fusion – it is intuitive and you just use it. ie. I wonder if something is possible and then the first thing I try turns out to just work. FreeCAD is the one that requires tutorials. So if you love your hand being held, then I’d say FreeCAD is for you.
@Maya I haven’t been a big fan of some of your articles in the past, but thank you for this one. CAD is one of the very few reasons I still have a single Windows PC left (all the rest are linux). I learned CAD on Autocad nearly 25 years ago and picking up fusion 360 after getting an FDM printer Autocad knowledge translated well….but Windows….
I need to try out plasticity for linux still though.
Sorry wrote AutoCad but mean’t SolidWorks
That’s complicated, technically we are on Hackaday, this is a hack but I would say the useless/stupid kind of hack in the era of FOSS and very capable alternatives available.
You either spend the time learning this multiplatform and FOSS FreeCAD or use this proprietary-always-conneced/leaking Fusion limited to Win/Mac.
Again, we are on hackaday, you are not that professional dealing with 100k stuff, having rigs costing more than 73eur/m and you run mac or Win.
The only thing that could drives you, $today, to Fusion:
1) Your business depends on it and you should not to do this hack anyway.
2) Fusion does stuff not yet available on or reliably enough than on FreeCAD
3) You don’t care about FOSS.
Well, I can certainly imagine that there are quite a few people who prefer proprietary, outdated Photoshop CS2 on a Power Mac (or on x86 Mac w/ OS X 10.6.8; or Win32 version) over current, free GIMP on Linux.
The problem is that FOSS people are better coders than artists, designers or engineers, architects.
On FOSS projects, the ideology matters more than the usefulness of the software.
No wonder people introduced to FOSS first time are screaming in panic, pull their hair and run for the exixts. ;)
Great point on the ideology. There are definitely quirks where professionals reference tools and components differently than a programmer’s understanding.
Using the tools in a professional environment with fellow employees with significant experience and history make a difficult to pitch “they do it this way, they call it this” for all steps involved.
There are many great FOSS designers etc, it’s just that the FOSS coders do not want to listen. It is their project and they think they now know better.
It’s like the mechanic wanting to drive their own race car. There are reasons why they are mechanics in the first place and have someone else handle the design and driving.
They don’t want to listen, because usually the people talking are blowhards that are only talk and don’t put up code.
You want a change, do it and submit a pull.
Standard stupid FOSS developer response.
Not everyone is a coder. Get over it.
Put your antagonistic responses away and perhaps listen to folks with have some expertise in the activities you are writing code for.
Or even better, listen to the industrial design people who are brave enough to suggest alternatives to the less than intuitive UI’s that tend to pop out of these efforts.
Terrible response.
Expanding on the other reply. Even people who can code (not necessarily should) or are coders might not want to dive headfirst into a mess of code that makes sense to the lead dev but no one else.
Its not like every project is set up so you can simply hook in at one place and slap all your changes. There are some that end up being a spaghetti of changes for one minor modification.
@Sword .. I can write you some code, but you won’t like my integration/GUI tests. You really want to talk to people like us before we take your happy little code world apart. And if you don’t then we let your app rot to death and take our decades of experience somewhere else.
And once you get Fusion 360 kinda working good luck with the next point release. Been there, tried that. Because they require a network connection they also require you to constantly upgrade to each point release update by making files incompatible between updates.
It would be 100% different if they had a couple of developers verifying WINE support but they are more likely to break something because it worked on WINE than fix something because it doesn’t work in WINE.
FreeCAD 100% is the way to go. Version 0.91 was what made the transition from F360 to FreeCAD easy and now v1.0 is even better.
You have gone from Tech Dregs to Tech Drags.
That’s where I stopped reading.
If you have trouble sticking to the story correctly, how are we supposed to believe this is your only error?
I got Fusion working using Linux/wine but I found there were strange glitches and issues with certain features (can’t remember off the top of my head but there were several).
Giving up on making it work on my Linux machine and being tired of “only having a windows PC for Fusion” I switched entirely to freecad.
As others above have stated 0.91 was usable but also still a bit cumbersome…but luckily for me soon after learning 0.91 then 1.0 was pre-released….which fixed the majority of the complaints I had about Freecad.
It is close enough to Fusion now that if you already know F360 it really shouldn’t take more than a few days to get the hang of designing in it.
It took me years and multiple “tests” of freecad before I switched. Before I didn’t think it was ready. Now I do.
Currently, the only part of my entire toolchain that isn’t opensource is the tools used to flash the MCU on the board. It would be difficult to be shut out from my designs at this point.
Call this JankyHack(tm).
In my experience Wine is not the most stable piece of software compared to vanilla Windows or a Windows VM.
As other commenters have said, Fusion 360 does an awful lot of handholding that help you get the job done efficiently and there are integrated tools that FreeCAD users could only dream of but this is mainly due to having a dedicated team of engineers working on this stuff full-time.
With the release of FreeCAD 1.0, it now feels like proper CAD software. Earlier versions worked well but had some inherent problems which 1.0 has fixed.
I’ve designed a lot of models in FreeCAD and stuck them on the internet for people to download, the majority of which I have freely supplied the FreeCAD source files for.
Mangojelly just put up a video on his channel about some new features going into v1.1 which will improve workflows immensely. They are also starting to integrate features from the RealThunder branch and it can only get better.
None of this will have Autodesk quaking in their boots but having a piece of free software that is now starting to be a viable alternative to Fusion can only be a good thing.
Am I the only one that thinks ‘Running Fusion 360 On Linux With Wine’ is Rage-Baiting?
The problem is that this is fickle and too unstable a hack for eve a hobbyist.
Because Freecad, despite every update having its proponents claim it is the year of freecad, remains software where you pay dearly with your time, I in my goal to switch to Linux have been trying to find a good Cad to use.
With Fusion, from reading, the hacks to get it to work are oftwn broken for weeks at a time. It’s not suitable.
Im looking into things like Build123d and CadQuery but I’m starting to feel like I might just be chained to windows because Freecad continues to simply not be good enough.
Too many half thought out features, too buggy, too poor a user interface and too toxic a community.
I would love for the phrase “pay with your time” to die. Learning different software takes time. It’s the same mentality that keeps people from Linux as a whole. It’s not a clone of the software you’re trying to replace.
There are definitely toxic people in the freecad community, I’ve dealt with some myself, but it is also sometimes exhausting when every improvement in freecad, developed by volunteers, is responded to with this kind of “never good enough” or “it doesn’t work exactly like the multi-billion dollar companies software” mentality.
The way I learned freecad was, the first time I used it I found it infuriating and frustrating and it didn’t work the way I wanted. I came back to it about a year later with a new perspective and was able to pick it up okay and get used to its workflow. Now I’m as good at freecad as I ever was at fusion/solidworks. Things aren’t perfect, but they do improve drastically every update, especially the recent 1.0 release candidate.
I still keep a windows drive for some things, mostly VR games really, but more and more wine/proton makes it less and less often I boot in to windows. And having my linux and windows installs on separate nvme drives means rebooting takes seconds.
Fusion 360 is too expensive and requires a constant connection to Autodesk. Not sure why anyone would use it unless it’s required for work. Between Blender and FreeCAD, along with the many great add-ons, you can do far more, often with greater ease, using FOSS software.
if we was using wine producent newer create a native program. Sorry I hate wine.
I have no problem with closed source (xara or corelDraw 3 was super) but with emulation
Dear sir or madame,
W.i.n.e. -> Wine Is Not an Emulator :^)
Thank you,
Facts and Logic Commission
p.s.
“if we was using wine producent newer create a native program.”
What?
Just need to get wine running on my pi and I’ll be all set…
For this hobbyist I find FreeCad works fine. Every design I gave to my son was printable/cutable. Granted my projects aren’t complex (and never will be) . You know a certain panel with holes for laser cutting a piece of plywood, or something I can rotate into a round part are easy with FreeCad. Love it. Software developer by trade — not a drafter/designer.
The trouble is Autodesk have a habit of buying up the competition, running for a few years and then canning it, but of course only after cherry picking & integrating the best bits into the Autodesk family.
I despised FreeCAD but gave it a try with the 1.0 release. It has improved SO much. I highly recommend giving it another go to those who have tried it before and despised it. MangoJelly on you tube also has great tutorials to get you up and running.
Feels like a match made in hell…