[xubuntu-users] The Devil's Advocate

[Peter Flynn]

On 07/12/2017 08:45 PM, Joao Monteiro wrote:
> I have been using Turbocad for nearly two decades and rely heavily on it
> for my electric schematics. Sadly, the software authors/company never
> provided any drivers for linux. And after a fairly deep search for
> alternatives, the odd couple of them available are exceedingly
> inadequate and unstable in behaviour for my cad needs.

Have you tried Codeweavers WINE? It's a well-supported commercial fork
of WINE, which provides a Windows environment inside Linux/Mac. I use it
on the occasions where I specifically need to use Microsoft Word instead
of Libre Office. I think it's $50 or something like that. You will need
a fast machine with lots of memory but IMHO it's well worth it.

> Not a Linux shortcoming, see... just one of the many cases where
> authors/developers don't bother considering linux usage for it when
> developing it.

The clue is in your first sentence ("for nearly two decades"). Twenty
years ago, Linux was niche and hardly even known by Windows or Mac
developers. It's quite common for an old codebase like Turbocad to be so
heavily rooted in the Windows way of doing things that creating a Linux
version would be too expensive for the small number of users.

Despite the fact that Mac OS X is basically Linux, the differences both
in code standards and in the display manager make it a majot task to
develop a Linux version.

> So the question obviously is: why don't software developers in some
> areas even bother with linux when developing their applications?

Many commercial software companies are also very poorly informed about
Linux and other Open Source platforms. There is a huge amount of both
misinformation and disinformation in the very narrow scope of business
decision makers, so unless the decision is simple and quick and
profitable, they will not take it.

///Peter