594
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
594 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
59428 readers
3118 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To be fair, PrusaSlicer and its derivatives do have native Linux support. And you can use Onshape from the browser on Linux just fine and it is honestly really good. I do a lot of this stuff too
I’m not an expert, but I really doubt that most open source software can compete with the features and support of enterprise products. In almost every industry there are FOSS alternatives to professional software, but they mostly get ignored. If you really could pump out the same quality of work as quickly, I don’t think that most companies would forego the opportunity to save some money on licensing fees.
Well, first off I wasn't presenting a "FOSS first" argument here. Onshape is a closed-source browser based CAD software but it works really well and I enjoy it. PrusaSlicer IS FOSS, but it is developed by the folks at Prusa who build the Prusa i3 printers - it is widely considered to be the "standard" for 3D printing slicers, better than CURA for sure.
Second off, this argument has an element of truth but kind of misses the plot. It is DEFINITELY possible for FOSS to be better and widely used and there are a couple of examples. I don't have a ton of time right now but just for fun I'll list a few. Blender is a great one, don't really need to explain how good it is. Also, KiCAD is really good these days too, second only to Altium. There are many more as well!
I agree that’s it’s possible, and hopefully it gets to be more common in the future. It’s hard to compete with professional software since they often have large full-time dev and support teams, but there is a handful of examples of FOSS software that debatably outperform the competition.