The problem is mostly a lack of competition in specific fields. And the companies that own the monopoly in their respective niches make it so that any form of competition is either…
immediately acquired and killed
handicapped by market dependencies on pantented features
unable to generate business because customer processes are completely dependant on proprietary solutions
Most of these applications have codebases that are FUCKING ANCIENT. Let’s take a look at Solidworks for example, which is the industry standard for Computer Aided Design for the manufacturing industry. Under the hood, it’s still the same software from the 1990’s. And there is no incentive for Dassault Systemes to rewrite the codebase.
Lots of these giant monopolistic software products have turned into frankenstein-esque monstrosities over the years. I often tell people they are built like backyard playhouses that have been expanded over the years by building an extra story on top, adding a swingset, adding a slide, extending the roof and attaching a rope ladder to the side.
All of this makes for more functionality, but they haven’t really thought about the structural integrity of the original playhouse. In a direct parallel many of these programs have unmaintainable code that no one dares touch because “hey it works, and we need to keep it that way because if we break it we’re no longer getting payed”.
These companies unintentionally hold their businessmodel hostage by choosing profits over innovation and investment in an adaptable codebase.
Which is why it is near impossible for them to support technologies that are different from their original install base. And this is also why they have incentives to make sure they stay in the lead becuase they know damn well that open source movements that get some support and take flight are dangerous to their market share, and by extension their profits.
Blender is probably one of the best examples of what good open source software will do to an industry. The day someone develops a parametric CAD solution that’s platform agnostic and based on open standards we’ll see a lot of engineers ditch Windows for Linux.
And when KiCAD gains enough features to make it able to compete in the enterprise space.
Altium still just has a ton of features that people use every day.
Cloud libraries, multi-channel design, flexpcbs, some good high speed tools, output job files, better curved traces for RF (though kicad melting + teardrop is ahead of altium in my opinion, though more clunky).
I have hope for FreeCAD now that Ondsel is on board pushing the community/enterprise split that OnShape does. They are shooting for a 1.0 next year. Though I think it will take until 2.0 to get it professionally usable.
I haven’t dabbled that much in PCB design but I have seen some good things in KiCAD. All my electro engineer homies assure me Altium’s the way to go for now though. Most of them also happen to be big F(L)OSS nerds so I’m curious to see where KiCAD goes in the future.
FreeCAD is an awesome attempt at building a parametric CAD modeler, though it will need a lot of polish to be usable. Especially on the UX side of things the software could do with a lot of improvement. As far as I know the most difficult part to program for parametric modelers is the actual geometry kernel, which is why so many modelers are based on Parasolid, including the recent hybrid modeler Plasticity. For a F(L)OSS parametric CAD modeler to truly succeed some genius needs to build an open geometry kernel that performs at least close to on par with Parasolid. But that takes a special kind of autistic in order to achieve. Either that or the engineering world needs to collectively decide this needs to happen.
As much as I hope FreeCAD becomes the open source alternative everyone is looking for, it is trying to be everything at once and that might be too ambitious for the current state of the project. I’m secretly hoping we also get a new project sometime soon with a smaller scope.
Okay but for more clarity sake. LINUX IS NOT UNIX. I don’t care how many certifications or random university teachers mix the two up, they’re wrong.
Linux has only one bit of history with Unix and that is the fact it was made because there was no easily accessible Unix source code for Linus and other students to use. Linus made a Unix-like os. Hence Lin-ux. But it’s not Unix. It doesn’t use any Unix source code. It’s not based on System V or any other official Unix version. Linux is Unix in name only. Its POSIX compliant and has a few POSIX certified distros, but it’s not Unix.
This fact is what made it so favorable to devs worldwide. Unix having his history as a proprietary operating system with a confusing license situation where AT&T would seemingly go sue happy at random made Unix scary and unfavorable.
Linux was built from the ground up. It had no such history. If Linux were Unix this couldn’t possibly have been true, and it certainly wouldn’t have gone on to take over the server and smart phone markets.
False sense of security. You accidentally downloaded a virus that doesn’t work on your system… What kind of habits and hygiene are you rolling with on a day to day basis?
Midnight Commander has been around for ages. It’s a straight ripoff/homage to the original Norton Commander, a full-fledged file manager and a godsend on week-kneed machines (like old netbooks).
I use the free version for my Win10 VM. It works well, plus it’s super easy to share folders between guest and host. I’m not sure about 3D though, I use it for Photoshop & Illustrator.
I already used QEMU which was a heck more complicated than VirtualBox, although I got MacOS Big Sur running with acceptable speed at the end. Sadly no-joy with NVidia single GPU passthrough in the apple garden. But I plan to do it for Windows 10 because I want that fucking 1TB NVMe that the big ass of my Windows install is hibernating on for the second year.
What GPU are you using and if it’s Nvidia, was it difficult to enable?
Title textGotta feel kind of bad for nation-state hackers who spend years implanting and cultivating some hardware exploit, only to discover the entire target database is already exposed to anyone with a web browser.
I am just astonished of weird projects with no real purpose. Like RedoxOS is something actually new, and its very cool. But just a random Unix? Why? People really have too much time and skills
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