Draftsight 2D CAD

[russellz]

Dassault Systems have announced that they are withdrawing support for the free version and that it will cease to function at the end of the year. The new version is on a subscription model and will be Windows only

Does anyone know of a good alternative? Qcad works with most of my drawings but messes up a few and I find the way of working with it somewhat alien after decades of using Autocad at work.

Russell

[Commodore 64]

I have been using Auto-Cad LT98 on Lm 17.3, 18.3, 19, and now on Lm19.1. I installed using WINE with no problems. I know this is an older version but it works. I have not tried newer versions. I hope this helps.

[bjmh46]

I've been looking at alternatives myself. Been using Draftsight since the first version was released and it has been an up-and-down experience. DS is a pretty comprehensive and feature rich 2d program, although a couple of versions have been broken. Dassault-Systemes has also been a pain, and their forum for DS is very poor. All this said I continued to use it because after 30+ years of autocad experience, it has been the best free alternative without a learning curve, and capable of opening and editing my sizable archive of .dwg files.

Since the DS announcement last week, I was able to install an old friend from my Windows days: Progecad 2009. Works in Mint 18.3 under wine 1.6.2, but not 100%. I've never cared much for Qcad, but I finally installed Librecad (actually on 18.3 I'm using an appimage, although an older version can be installed with synaptic but doesn't show up in software manager). On Mint 19, a new enough version is available in the software manager, and I installed it. I have one older (2nd gen i5) thinkpad with windows on it, Progecad installed and 100% working. This is my backup for when Librecad is too cumbersome or fails for certain operations. For the most part, Librecad is very capable, but you've got to think more like the old days on the board (manual drafting). Lots of features are missing, and some of the frequently used DS/Autocad commands must be accomplished in 2 or 3 stebs using multiple commands.

When it's all said and done, Librecad will be my go-to 2d cad application. It's really a remarkable piece of open-source work if you give it a chance. Some of my converted .dwg files (odaf file converter) won't open when converted to dxf, but Librecad can open .dwg (again not 100%), hence my Progecad-on-windows backup. I've already started to discipline myself to use only Librecad for new drawings and that's going well. Archive drawings are a crapshoot but most can be made to work with a little editing.

Bob

[catweazel]

https://alternativeto.net/software/draf ... form=linux