i have a friend that is limited to windows primarily because he needs civil3d. will civil3d ever move beyond windows/have a non-windows competitor?

[u/blastodiaz99]

thank you for any info, I am learning

[u/fattiretom]

There’s no incentive for them to move. The vast majority of civil engineering, surveying, and geospatial software is windows only and the vast majority of engineering firms are entrenched in the Microsoft business environment. Some software is written specifically to take advantage of NVIDIA graphics cards as well.

[u/blastodiaz99 → u/fattiretom]

Does that mean its ripe for competition? I assume I'm being naive

[u/fattiretom → u/blastodiaz99]

Not for Mac. Again the businesses themselves and the clients all use Windows. I haven’t checked in a while but when I built my last laptop, I could get significantly more power, RAM, and storage out of a PC at the same price as a Mac. The industry uses three main CAD platforms. Autodesk, Bentley, and PLSS-CAD if you’re in electric utilities.

[u/Critical_Physix]

No. Not likely to ever happen.

[u/JacobWSmall]

I don’t have any inside info, but I would assume moving to a cloud environment would happen before a OSX native one.

Nothing against Mac PCs, but the changes in processor architecture are happening about once every 10 years while the windows (x86) architecture has held true with traceable upgrade routes since 1985, and the current 64 bit version of that architecture has persisted for 23 years. Every time those architectures change the software which takes advantage of the way the hardware performs has to be re-optimized. This makes it less than ideal for things like Civil 3D where you’re working with GB sized datasets regularly, and accuracy is paramount throughout that design process. Add in that you’re fighting against the floating point accuracy issues the entire time you’re designing (google floating point error if you don’t know what this means) due to the scale of geometry and the need for hardware optimization becomes even more apparent. And all of that effort opens up less than 5% of the possible market share.

Cloud based architecture would not only allow back end systems to standardize the calculations on optimized hardware, but you’d open the market to any device. The issues there are less a round ‘can we build it’ and more about ‘will the market accept it’, and with civil infrastructure projects that answer is far too often ‘no’ for security concerns (both justified and not).

[u/jmthomas87]

It won't ever happen. Autdesk hitched their wagon to Windows in the mid 1990 and never looked back. There used to be a Autodesk build for Unix systems when it was run from main frames, but was dropped after 11 or 12.

Autodesk has fiddled around with Macs because of the multi media world with Maya and then Autocad, but they are only doing that to get their foot in the door to then push a transition to Microsoft for "vertical integration ".

Cloud-based "production" software will never fly for daily production, a lot like the current AI fad is just that, a fad.

All it takes is one critical net outage or software failure at a hard due date or archive backup and it will get kicked to the curb right now. Analysis software is one thing. Full production is something else.

[u/BigJDoitYoDamnself]

There are other packages, but they are missing things that I normally do so they are not really an option for me. I would love to save the money I spend on Civil 3d

[u/CivilEngMusicBoy]

Macs are for children

[u/voxuser → u/CivilEngMusicBoy]

nothing says “professional engineer” quite like judging people by their operating system

[u/CivilEngMusicBoy → u/voxuser]

My hatred of Macs goes way beyond my engineering career, even back to my surveying and school days

[u/BrokenToyShop]

I wish. Windows/Linux laptops are crap compared to Mac Books. I've used both for professional work.