Part of me wants to be wary. The useful life of industrial machinery such as CNC mills is much longer than the lifespan of websites, so locally-installed software you own is usually a better choice.

But another part of me realizes that everyone is using Fusion360, despite the fact they have a history of taking away features to force people to migrate to paid tiers. So it probably doesn't matter.

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soanvig 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> much longer than the lifespan of websites

But browsers (and browser technologies) have documented track of being fully backward compatible up to the beginnings of WWW, and it's not going to change.

Which actually is much much better than any other environment you can imagine - unless of course you use (and want to use) that one frozen in time 25 year old PC. And pray nothing breaks (y2k bugs and whatnot).

If the software is open source (and works offline) you can have it functional in 10 or 20 more years.

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asveikau 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For comparison, I was looking at slicer source lately. Slic3r and its popular forks (prusa slicer, Bambu, orca) are using C++ with wxWidgets and boost. Sometimes outdated versions of those libraries at that. But stuff that will work, and totally local.

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s0a 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

of Kiri? it's in its 14th year. CAM was added in 2016, but the major work on that mode really kicked in around 2024.

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the_fall 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I have a CNC mill made in 2006. It's still perfectly fine. It should still be fine in 2036. The most significant threat to its existence is the compatibility of OS drivers and software support in CAM tools. That and USB ports getting replaced by something else, which was a problem for earlier-generation machines that used RS-232.

	▲	gmueckl an hour ago \| parent [-]
		USB to RS233 adapters should still work for those unless there are really weird timig requirememts.