this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
681 points (87.4% liked)

Technology

69491 readers
4033 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] muhyb@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago (17 children)

Don't know about your workflow but have you tried FreeCAD? It surely won't be like Solidworks, but might work for you.

[–] Damage@feddit.it 10 points 1 day ago (16 children)

I've been... Struggling with FreeCAD for a while. I really want to support it, you know, open source and all, but it's really rough. Something that takes 10 minutes in SOLIDWORKS takes at least one hour in FreeCAD, not accounting for crashes, and complexity increases time exponentially.
Importing and placing .step files is rather difficult, big assemblies tend to degenerate despite careful binding; I try to bind to the origin as much as possible, often sacrificing adaptability, but it still gets messed up after a while.

[–] Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 3 points 1 day ago (8 children)

Have you tried it since 1.0? It's pretty ok.

What keeps me from making the switch is music-making. None of my plugins run on Linux and sound drivers supposedly are a huge mess.

[–] swab148@startrek.website 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've been making an album on Linux, anything I can help with?

[–] Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Maybe my info on sound drivers is outdated... I play guitar and rely on low latency for my interface. I use neuralDSP plugins (not just for recording, also for jamming). Is it possible to get this running somehow? Any good DAWs you know of?

[–] swab148@startrek.website 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the sound driver thing has been sorted since pipewire came out, it acts as a sort of bridge between the different sound servers. As far as your plugins, I found two posts from the old place about it: here and here, I wouldn't know specifically on those since I mostly use the open-source ones in the Arch repos. If neither of those help, you could try yabridge, which would be available from your distro's package manager.

As far as DAWs, I'm using Ardour, which is completely free, but there's also a couple of paid ones, REAPER, at $60 for individuals or $225 for a commercial license, and Bitwig, which costs between $100 and $400 depending on which license you buy. Personally, Ardour's been fine for me.

Low-latency can be achieved a few different ways, Ubuntu has a distro called Ubuntu Studio that uses their own tricks to make it happen, it also comes with a bunch of extra stuff for graphic design and video editing. Personally, I went with Arch, and followed the instructions on the Arch wiki, and I see latencies in the low single digits of milliseconds. There's also AV Linux and KX Studio , but I haven't used those, so I couldn't tell you much about them, other than that I hear good things about them.

That was a longer reply than I had intended, but if you make the switch, good luck and rock on!

[–] Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Mate, thanks for the information! I saved the comment and will setup a dual boot on my laptop during my next vacation. I really want to make the switch finally. I'm fed up with these mega corporations shoving their bullshit on us.

[–] swab148@startrek.website 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Anytime! One of the best things about Linux is that if you're having trouble, you can ask the community for help and more than likely, someone's gonna know something about it, so help is just a post away! Have fun, and good luck!

[–] Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Any communities you can recommend? In the past I had many unfortunate encounters with toxic users that had no patience for newbies. If they're anything like you, I'd be very happy!

[–] swab148@startrek.website 2 points 8 hours ago

Honestly, you've kinda already found one of the best, here on Lemmy! Other than that, depending on which distro you choose, the Arch community can be a little terse, but definitely the most knowledgeable and more than willing to help if you do your research first. The Mint community is pretty nice, and patient since the distro is aimed at newbies. LinuxMusicians is a nice forum, and not so distro-specific, but I've noticed that they tend to get bogged down in the "why" and not the "how" on occasion. Really, other than Phoronix and the LKML, the Linux community in general is pretty cool, just a few loud voices give us a bad rap for being too insular, but that's changing pretty quickly.

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (13 replies)
load more comments (13 replies)