Open Letter to AutoDesk; You're shooting yourself in the foot.

[huckabywyatt]

To Whom it may concern.

As you may know, Fusion360 is deeply entrenched into the professional and hobbyist engineering spaces. Years of work and support has been poured into Fusion, and the result is possibly the most powerful parametric modeling suites ever made. Some oversights here and there, sure, nonetheless it seems everyone from hobbyist electronic and robotics nerds, to full time mechanical engineers, support and use your product every single day. But there is something that everyone, has been asking for and perhaps it has been unheard.

We want Linux support.

in the robotics industry, Linux is used extensively for software engineering, and setting up micro-controllers required to make robots move. In addition, Linux is often ran in 3D printer racks to manage print jobs, and slice models. However due to lackluster Linux support, you have left these people behind. These people are forced to either use crappy solutions to try and run Fusion inside of Wine on Linux, or switch to FreeCAD, which seems to be living in 2005.

This is evidence to the comical quantity of downloads of FreeCAD every single day.

I don't expect a complete port of Fusion360 to Linux, that would be not only time consuming, but potentially expensive to develop (Despite the MacOS port being a good start). However, what would be helpful is a rough direction to get the multitudes of compatibility layers to work better with Fusion360. No one knows your software better than you, but we have done the hard part of adding Windows compatibility in the form of countless dependencies, and functioning winAPI support.

Projects that are just starting to come into existence, such as cryinkfly's Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux are a great start, but fall short, particularly when an update that fundamentally changes functionality comes into place.

Any help would be appreciated, and we would love to get fusion in the hands of these people who want nothing more than a reliable 3D CAD software.

Sincerely,

Wyatt Huckaby

[TrippyLighting]

Please read through this thread and see if your new threads adds anything of value:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-design-validate/does-autodesk-fusion-360-support-linux-os/...

[huckabywyatt]

After consideration and reading through not only the mentioned thread, but also the archived idea for fusion, I would definitely make the argument this post is still relevant. I think the situation has changed considerably over whats almost a decade. I would make the argument that particularly for robotics and embedded systems engineering, having to switch between two different platforms leaves a lot to be desired.

In addition, the scientific community, which in several fields has been running Linux for years, could surely benefit from a reliable CAD/Cam package.

I'm not asking for a complete port either; what I'm asking for is help. The Linux community has already done the painful work of getting fusion working on Linux. That being said, its painful to use, and can break when Fusion has a major update (its still broken from when fusion updated their login system; honestly what inspired this post).

To summarize; What I have to add to the discussion is the following:

A.) Change in market conditions, making even partial support more lucrative.

B.) A general willingness for the community to utilize any compatibility information Autodesk could possibly provide.