I always see people say this but does no one here use professional apps like solidworks or revit? Are there good Linux alternatives? I’d switch to Linux but I need solidworks for work I do.
Windows is the defacto standard for desktop PCs for a reason. In a corporate setting it’s kind of the ideal.
Because of the sheer number of users, most software is built with Windows in mind and therefore has the most support. It’s pretty rare that you find an application that doesn’t have a Windows build available.
On top of that tools like Active Directory, and group policy makes managing thousands of machines at scale a reasonably simple affair.
Microsoft is a corporation rather than a community so you can always expect their main goals to be profit-driven and that comes with some nasty baggage, but it’s not enough that it’s easy for professionals to make the switch.
Linux has made lightspeed progress over the last decade, especially with Proton making games mostly work cross platform, but outside of specialist use cases, the vast majority of business PCs and by extension home PCs will be running Windows for the foreseeable future.
The popularity of Windows is largely due to the fact it’s pre installed on most PC’s when you buy them, people literally think Windows ‘is the computer’. Such popularity has little to do with Windows being a great OS. In many ways Windows is like McDonalds: It’s not the best, it’s not the worst, it just fills that hump in the bell curve.
Due to the fact Linux has no marketing department, it’s unlikely this will ever change.
Windows comes pre-installed on PCs when you buy them because it’s what people are generally comfortable using, because it’s what they use at work too.
And Windows is used on business PCs largely because of how manageable they are at scale. Windows is expensive. Like, really expensive. If you have 1000 PCs that have Windows and Office E3, assuming a bulk discount, that’s an up front cost of ~$200000 with the subscription costing an additional ~$20000/month. If it was feasible for business to change to a free alternative, I guarantee they would’ve done so.
You’re right in that that Windows is not some super great OS, but it does some things way better than anything else that make it an ideal choice for business use.
Closest thing I use to a professional app is DaVinci Resolve Studio on a distribution that is not officially supported by Blackmagic. Not only does Resolve Studio work perfectly, I am able to use Blackmagic hardware (Intensity Pro 4k, Speed Editor) without having to mess around with settings, config files, permissions, packages, etc.
The caveat here is the initial setup: I use an AMD GPU, and it’s a bit of a pain to get the free and licensed versions of Resolve working with those under Linux. However, once that’s out of the way, it’s completely seamless.
As for CAD…yeah that’s where everything falls over. There are tons of FOSS alternatives out there but I have yet to see any of them in a professional setting. Even Fusion360 is hit or miss under Wine, I spun up a Windows VM just to use that for my 3D printer tinkering.
