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https://www.onshape.com Build by some Solidworks people offering basically the same experience but in the browser with server side computation. Very promising as it tries to solve problems which the older CAD players can't tackle with there current desktop tech.


God, I have such mixed feelings after viewing the product overview video on their site.

On the one hand, you can't deny the wins that comes from bullshit-free operations - no installing, no permissions, no need to deal with sysadmins to approve a new program[0], and updates do themselves. Files are backed up and trivially shared across devices.

On the other hand, you're now locked in to a vendor system, with vendor software doing file management, version control and sharing. You need constant access to Internet to do anything at all.

Then there's also issue of performance. I actually registered for a free personal account and started playing with this software. I saw more-less what I expected: it kinda works, like most such web tools kinda work - good enough to do something, but laggy and slow enough to piss me off if I were to spend more than 10 minutes designing anything in it.

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I can understand all the cloud nonsense (though I prefer regular files, thank you very much). But from the quick experience, the application would feel much better if it was a desktop/mobile native program, not a webapp. It's like with Google Office suite - looks cool to have it in a browser and it sorta can help with the basic things, but try to build a reasonably-sized document, spreadsheet or slideshow, and the performance drop will make you tear your hair out.

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[0] - How security is done on work machines is ridiculous, though it's a separate topic. I'll just leave this: https://xkcd.com/1200/.


You guys all have kill cords attached to your wrist, right? https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill


I dread whenever I need to open MS Word and choose G Suite anytime I need to write a longer document...


Because you are on Linux, or because you like your software laggy? ;).


Office suite takes a ridiculous time to load on OS X. Plus stuff like Word is painfully over bloated.

If you need to print something that looks reasonably nice - then maybe Word would make sense.

Thankfully we are sort of living in digital era where printing is synonym to bureaucracy.




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