I have grown up around Linux and have had people like my dad use it near me my whole life. I even booted a fedora version once on a very old machine when I was younger as a way for my dad to teach me about Linux. Sadly I never really caught on at the time.
I am ready to really jump in now. Is there a beginners guide/pros cons comparison for different distribution of Linux? I am also curious about how well things like matlab, solidworks, and Office suit/libra office work in Linux.
Thank you!
For office suite, if you deal a lot with MS office formats, you might get a better experience with Onlyoffice (FOSS). You also have the option of web based office suites (Google docs, office 365 etc.)
You might like to take a look here at some alternatives to solidworks, too.
I guess they won’t be as powerful as SOLIDWORKS though.
Does solidowrks exist on linux? CAD software is almost the only thing that holds me back from switching to linux completely.
Im not sure about matlab, but checkout R
https://freecad.org is the big cross platform free as in freedom mechanical cad.
Matlab exists for Linux and is the same as on Windows. LibreOffice is a fully functioning office suit for Linux.
I can’t speak to SOLIDWORKS, their website only lists a windows version. There is however some community work being done here https://github.com/cryinkfly/SOLIDWORKS-for-Linux And it looks like they have it running.
Given that Fedora and Ubuntu are listed on that github, you should probably start with either one of those.
For a complete beginner I’d recommend Ubuntu, since it’s a solid distro with huge wealth on online support available.
If you’re coming from Windows, or like the windows look then I’d recommend trying the cinnamon flavor of Ubuntu (or straight up Linux Mint which is also Ubuntu based).
