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What would you use if you couldn't use your current distribution/operating system?
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday February 25, @08:29AM (12 children)
More than anything else, GP has to be pitied. There are certainly enough open source replacements to do what GP does but not exactly that way and maybe with a certain feature missing. It is about personal workflows and sometimes clients do insist. The latter is often a real deal-breaker for Linux thanks to all that M$ bullying.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday February 25, @06:39PM (11 children)
You just made the ACs point. There is NOTHING on Linux that even comes close to meeting my professional needs.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by dx3bydt3 on Wednesday February 25, @09:26PM (9 children)
CAD/CAM I think is really one of the areas most lacking in solid Linux compatible solutions.
I have no suggestions for a mastercam replacement, but I can say that onshape is really good for 3d modelling. I used solidworks regularly up until the 2008 version - which I continued to use for around 10 more years until I started using onshape, which is significantly more useable than that older version of solidworks in my opinion. Downsides are all that it is cloud based, and could disappear at any time, and the only backups you can have of your models in practice are .step or similar solids, the feature trees will be gone.
Note, I am not suggesting either that you should switch, just putting it out there that a competitive 3d modelling solution that can be used on Linux does exist.
FreeCAD continues to improve too, and is quite usable for simple parts, but isn't yet in the same ballpark of usability as onshape or solidworks. Proponents may claim otherwise, but I find the UI fights me with every attempt to do anything moderately complex. I will keep trying it though, the prospect of having model files in a format that isn't locked down, and software that isn't a subscription is worth the effort.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday February 25, @11:34PM (5 children)
Yeah, cloud is a nonstarter. Most of my work is covered by NDAs.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 26, @02:03AM
I talked to a machinist I know at length about this. Beyond the NDAs that are common in the industry, even worse would be hacks of the service. If the SaaS provider were breached, then their designs that are verified to work could leak. And his competitors or even his own clients (who could take it to a competitor) with access to that information could ruin him. Worse, he could do everything right and still get screwed. Very easy to say "no" to cloud in those circumstances.
(Score: 3, Touché) by dx3bydt3 on Thursday February 26, @03:33AM (1 child)
Regarding NDAs and special compliance requirements like ITAR I find it surprising that there hasn't been a lockdown version of windows made available. Sure, Pro allows you to adjust more things, but all versions as far as I know send some undisclosed telemetry to MS. How does that work with an NDA?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 11, @08:25PM (1 child)
Careful, the list of things only mastercam can do shrinks every year and wasn't that long of a list to begin with.
Lemme guess you're either doing something really weird with like 7-axis simultaneous motion to make crazy shapes like engine turbos, which mastercam is legendary at, or you're doing something with so many holes you can't avoid using the "solid hole" thing in mastercam. IIRC it has integrated automatic deburr but doesn't everyone now?
For non-machinists (or wanna be machinists in my case) who are programmers, solid hole is like instead of drawing complicated threaded holes there's an object at the base level to peck drill and counterbore and tap holes as a base object rather than something you draw and infer. Which is probably wrong enough to offend both the machinists and the OO programmers simultaneously but its not bad for a one-liner. "Its really good at drilling complicated holes".
There ain't much else that mastercam, and only mastercam, can do. Even using their free demo license, mastercam was just too much of a hassle when I tried it. I get it that being able to do anything means you got a lot of flaming hoops to jump thru but it was a bit excessive.
My machinist skills top out around drilling heatsink holes and chassis holes in general. It's just easier to conversationally CNC than do it by hand, at least if you want it accurate to the thousandth of an inch so parts just drop in place. In PCB work I'm well aware of flatcam but my results are awful copper tears off, "smears" almost, it never turns out well. The answer always seems to be "bro just buy a $15K air spindle bro" which would work but $15K would fund outsourced pcb construction for decades by me. Yeah yeah I know that Usagi Electric guy runs flatcam on his youtube channel and it works great for him but it never works for me. I've made replacement gears on a mill that worked the first time, I guess that's mildly impressive for a hobbyist. Gears are cool.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday March 12, @06:06AM
I don't think I ever claimed that only Mastercam can do this job. There are other CAM softwares that would be equally capable, like Top Solid, NX, and a few others. They all share the common traits of being proprietary and Windows only.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 26, @01:48AM (2 children)
Mastercam is so expensive precisely because there is literally no replacement for them, paid or otherwise, once you get to a certain level of advanced design or equipment. I can't say if op is at that level or not, but if he says he is then I believe him. He wouldn't be dropping thousands per year on software if it were just to avoid learning a new system or it was just a missing convenience feature. At a minimum, he and hundreds of thousands who use it (it is the most used CAM software in the world after all) agree it is paying for itself. And all that money is part of the reason why it is so hard for competitors to catch up. Mastercam even warrants the results of their software wont damage your equipment if you are a big enough costumer with the right setup. To be honest, any open source competitor will never catch up, let alone be close, and cloud is a no-go for many professional machinists for NDA and competitive reasons.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday February 26, @07:35PM (1 child)
There are a few practical alternatives to Mastercam, but they're all similarly priced, and they're all Windows only.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 26, @10:04PM
Thanks for the correction. I probably took the machinist I mentioned in another comment too literally when he said there are none. He could also have meant it as a "none worth using" sort of sense as everyone there already used Mastercam, the new people coming in from college know Mastercam, and they are all similarly priced anyway. But what do I know? I can just relate what he told me before I stood there watching like an amazed child as the almost-million-dollar machine turned a rod of metal into usable parts identical to fractions of a millimeter in a matter of minutes.