Mar 29, 2011

Application Review: Bricscad V11 Classic Linux (Part I)

Bricscad is well known on Linux world. Not only for being the first native dwg-based CAD, but also for the support of the Wine version some years ago. Bricscad Classic is at the moment the only product of Bricsys that runs on Linux. Pro version with support of full ACIS 3D modelling, rendering and BRX, will be released later.

Bricscad uses wxWidgets toolkit to built the GUI and the result on GNOME is beautiful but on KDE a total disaster! After testing some CAD applications I have to say that KDE is not the best choice for a Linux CAD workstation, and appearance is not the only reason. Performance is also better on GNOME especially with Bricscad.
Bricsys provides deb and rpm packages of Bricscad and tgz packages for custom installations. Packages are 32bit only but marked as architecture independent, so you don't have to use terminal for installing on 64bit systems. Therefore my suggestion is to use 32bit OS.
Bricscad is available for free download (registration required), and you can test it for 30 days without any limitations. Commercial licenses of Bricscad Classic for Linux start from 315 € (without VAT)
The first impression of Bricscad Classic for Linux was a bit disappointing. Some very annoying bugs and an unpolished look and feel, make me wonder if anybody would spend some money to buy this stuff especially after the release of DraftSight for Linux. After some days of usage I realized that Bricscad is a good product. Problems are something common on newcomers, (see AutoCAD for Mac) but it's very uncommon for Linux users to realize that some times happens to pay for unfinished products. (Linux users are quite unfamiliar with commercial software)
Continue to Part II
*Bricscad has more difficult job than ARES to be well integrated with the Linux environment. Porting an existing application to another  OS is more difficult than building from scratch a cross-platform application.
At the moment ARES seems to be better integrated and more polished than Bricscad. Nevertheless it would be wrong to say that this disadvantage will be permanent.

1 comment:

  1. Now you can download trazar city tools for Bricscad Linux.

    http://www.trazar.com.pa/

    It's great notice for linux users.

    ReplyDelete