SPOILER: Win your bet!
14 11 2007CAD! ENJOY your new laptop 
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Sadly, you’re right. It’s about time something changes in that regard.
Ya, I have been waiting, that’s for sure. That isn’t to say that there are some decent CAD offers out there for Linux, most of which are non-free, but still, they don’t 1) add up to AutoCAD and 2) barely support AutoCAD. I hope eventually either a) AutoDesk realizes that it would be great to release a Linux version, or b) open up their specs and let people take a look. AutoDesk/AutoCAD is the largest software monopoly when it comes to CAD. I can’t thing of anyone else that is half as good. A little competition never hurt anybody
It seems to be all possible to run AutoCAD under Wine:
http://architectafrica.com/bin0/news200411111_wine.html
so no laptop for him yet.
http://www.bricscad.com - demo will run for those 30 days
@Lynoure: no, that is AutoCAD R14, and I remember trying it (in 1998). It never worked correctly. Sure, if you were lucky you could get it to start up and you could browse the example CAD files. Plus, no one in the right mind uses R14 anymore.
@Ante: I have BrisCAD, it is the one CAD solution that I was really referring to a few posts up. Good, but not good enough, YET! I think in about 10 years, if BrisCAD stays in the game, then maybe they will have a chance. It needs to become more advanced yet, but it definitely has a wonderful start. If they can build on the mess that InteliCAD made, and make it better, then watch out
Sadly for him the bet is about the things he _usually_ do on his windows machine, if he doesn’t use AutoCAD then he can’t win the bet based on the lack of a good alternative.
The point of the bet is demonstrate to his friend that Linux is a good alternative to almost everyone.
@Weeber: true, but I had to have a little fun with it
I am not a gamer, so games don’t bother me, but I know that makes me the smallest majority ever. CAD is about the only thing that requires me to use Windows every now and then.
One thing I made clear going back to school, this time for some computer science, was that I didn’t want to have to depend on Microsoft products. I have never had to depend on them since 1994, so why start now. Java, C++, Linux, Unix Scripting, Javascript, HTML, and such I knew would be a breeze on Linux. Only problem I had with any of these classes was in Java when having to use ODBC to connect to a mdb (Access) database file. I tried UnixODBC and you name, but was unsuccessful. I wouldn’t put it past the fact that the database itself was bad, but it did work fine on a Windows machine. I took c# and .NET to see if Linux could hang, and 90% of the time I had no problem. Never had a problem with C# really, but some of the aspx garbage we did required me to use VS.NET. I tried on a couple of projects, successfully to say the least, to port those projects to Mono. Some worked, and some didn’t. I am sure this time next year, those projects will more than likely work. I took a couple of SQL classes where they used Access and Oracle to teach the class. I was able to use Kexi instead of Access without any problems, and connecting to Oracle was the typical breeze it usually is. Of course this use case is more developer oriented, but it goes to show I was able to take classes where MS products were preached and used, and I never had to really bog myself down with trying to learn another operating system or its applications.
I think games are pretty much the only spoiler for a lot of people using Linux full-time. I really can’t think of anything else, unless of course you are a Windows application developer.
Weeber said it best, “The point of the bet is to demonstrate to his friend that Linux is a good alternative to almost everyone.”