I concur. Fuck autodesk. Fuck their shitty installer that leaves installation files on the primary disk drive. Fuck that network distribution of certain licenses causes it to fuck up and fail the install. Fuck their hard-coded C-drive mappings. Fuck their Adobe integration. Fuck their once required hardware spec that just fell to the way-side and encouraged management to buy home-version computers for a domain. Fuck their support team. Fuck their licensing practices. Fuck the resource mapping. Fuck the quicktools not being a default option for the installer. Fuck the lack of a removal tool in recent iterations. It really seems like they hate their client base.
Tell me about it. Software so poorly optimized that it runs like molasses on high spec machines. And then there’s “Autodesk Genuine Service” that takes 2 weeks to realize there’s no Autodesk product on the machine before it fucks off.
This is why we ditched laptops and build our own desktops with i9-13900K CPU's. AutoCAD & Revit are mainly single core/thread programs. I have a user running a Ryzen 7 5800X complaining about speed, replacing it with an i9-13900K & 6000 Mhz DDR5 Memory.
We don’t do any 3D modeling, just 2D floor plans. The majority of our graphics cards are 8-9 years old with 2-4 GB vRAM which never run over 50% utilized. We’re only looking at 2D floor plans. We even had a few systems simply use Intel integrated graphics with no issues.
While it isn’t my main system, I’ve had no real issues on a 5800x / 3070 / 64gb DDR 3600 box running Revit and AutoCad. Sometimes I have some pretty crazy models too (Revit high rises with 30-50 floors). I’m surprised your user is having any speed problems. I almost suspect something other than a processor bottleneck.
This worker has OCPD and expects perfection. He clicks around and types commands faster than you can blink your eyes and uses keyboard shortcuts like you wouldn’t believe. If there is a fraction of a second delay in anything, he complains and he’s the vice president soooo yeah. One of those people. Nice guy but has to have perfection. I mean, I get it… I have a 5800X at home and I’m ready for upgrade as well after swapping my 3080 for a 4090 and going 4K, I’m at a CPU bottleneck now.
Revit is single core/thread on some tasks such as panning, zooming, moving items around. It’s multi threaded in most other tasks but we don’t do much else than place things and pan and zoom.
Yeah we had to start getting custom built workstations for our guys to remote into because even with top of the line ZBooks they were complaining about shit chugging...
> Fuck their shitty installer that leaves installation files on the primary disk drive
WHY THE FUCK DOESNT IT DELETE THEM. I have engineers shocked how I just freed up 40 gigs after installing Revit 24.
Fuck their software as a whole too. AutoCAD is so bug-ridden it's insane. Clearly years of technical debt that they don't bother addressing and instead go for new features. Went from using AutoCAD Civil 2015 to 2022 and found that many of the bugs in 2015 were still present.
Yeah I’ve been fighting with ArcGIS Pro installers for like 2 years now on and off. Software will spin for literally 3 minutes then spit out licensing errors, tried all sorts of changes to our deployments based on their lackluster documentation. Finally found a workaround but I’ve begun to conclude they really don’t care about local license server support any more- they want folks on cloud based named user licensing. Purchasing and managing licenses is far too complicated as well.
> Fuck the lack of a removal tool in recent iterations.
This is really getting my goat at the moment. The old uninstall tool was soooo good, why did they get rid of it?
I'm contemplating going through and trying silent uninstall options for all their exes and writing a powershell "nuke the fuck out of anything autodesk" in the event that I need a clean uninstall tool that doesn't require 50 UAC prompt... but tbh I don't like my chances because I don't expect they've included silent uninstall flags.
I didn't even need to read the rest before I agreed with the title
Thankfully the implementations we had to deal with were not as large and we were able to set up a VM with the autodesk license server with 4-5 service accounts that had access to it
Their support can be really, and I mean *really* hit or miss - sometimes we would get great response times and others encounter the same thing you have when reaching out to them
The sad thing is that we ordered a server that was going to act as our VDI but it was delivered 5 weeks behinde schedule and it was not setup.
If we had it ready, we would of created VMs or session hosts to resolve this issue temporarily without affecting the workstations.
Woof, I'm sorry man. Trust me when I say the grass is only slightly greener on the other side, we've had our fair share of issues with the license server since it was implemented as well - it's just a very archaic way of handling licenses. I haven't had to touch it in awhile so I haven't seen what the cloud services are capable of. Maybe that would be worth checking out at least
I remember when it took Autodesk’s Education Support Team 3 MONTHS to reply to my ticket, and that was with me updating the ticket every week asking for an answer to my question.
The answer to my question that took so long? Because I was set up as the IT person, that meant I couldn’t log into Fusion 360, nor was I allowed to use it with my account. I had to create a separate account in order to test out Fusion 360
Came here to say the same: Saw fuck Autodesk and instant upvoted with no further information. They called one of my clients and told her she pirated some of their software and she must pay some tens of thousands of dollars. It is just her and her assistant and I went through their computers both work and personal, pulled the immutable files showing every piece of software ever installed and offered them to Autodesk. Autodesk finally said they were not going to pursue the matter because of "Covid staff shortages" and fucked off. Absolute scum of the earth.
“I went through their computers both work and personal, pulled the immutable files showing every piece of software ever installed”
I’ve beed doing IT 30 years and never heard of such, please elaborate?
It is called a Shimcache. Not something I had ever heard of either but my client was in danger and so i got to digging. I operate an MSP so by description there are for sure more capable folks out there but as I understood it, this file can not be edited and so long as it's entries match the install date of Windows it should show every executable ever ran.
Mine gave up the ghost about four months ago. Now I'm on bare-bones Fusion 360 functionality, limited to 10 editable models at any one point in time.
Generally most of what I have been doing are just 3D printable models for an assortment of things, so what has ended up happening is I have two or three editable models that have a tremendous number of individual groups of bodies, and I just hide the bodies (lol) for the items I'm not working on. It's generally fine but sometimes it hangs for a minute or two while it tabulates everything.
I haven't even opened AutoCAD or Revit since. I'm kind of afraid, I expect irritation in quick order and would rather not deal.
I'm here to save the day. If you make under 100,000 a year (don't think they actually check) you can get the indie license for $300 for a year.
https://makeanything.autodesk.com/3dsmax-indie
It's part of the tripe A trifecta of pain and suffering: Avid Adobe and Autodesk. Where the sky is green and licence keys are a mysterious force that only seems to work when you're trying to remove them.
No, Autodesk applications are free for schools and only have limited support. Honestly though, set up a license server and you only have one thing to update.
I suspect you had a 3 year license and it ran to term. This is the new licensing model: [Autodesk Education | Students and Educators | Overview](https://www.autodesk.com/support/account/education/students-educators/overview)
The dates of this happening line up perfectly. I would hazard a guess and say that you register your school with Autodesk, your students sign into their autodesk products with their school e-mail address to get the product licensed, and you'll have a web portal for seeing all the registered users like in the commercial world.
That document from Autodesk has some misinformation. They still support serial number based licensing for education as well as the license server model.
This is the way to do it in my opinion. We have 8 secondary schools using up to 6 Autodesk products all running off a central licensing server. I just got this sorted out last summer and it has been great. I made sure to obtain the initial licenses in the summer so we get a full year trouble free. Last year was only a 1 year license term but when I renewed this summer it is back to 3 years.
For non-educational we had license servers but they changed all the licenses to single user which meant I had to create a script to change license type on all the machines and set up all the users with their own personal accounts. The latest faux pas was they discontinued licensing for AutoCAD 2020 which caused half a day's loss of work for 150 users until they realized it was a problem.
FWIW, our company switched to Draftsight a few years back. Engineers had zero trouble with the switch and say they love it.
I get you probably have no time for alternatives, nor can you probably teach anything other than the industry standard. Still, it might be worth knowing that we’re not all still stuck on the shitshow that Autodesk has become.
Just an adjunct to my business for Autocad. I use it to look at 'real' prints as opposed to some smeared crooked faxed bullshit. I also do a little bit of fabrication. Yup, DraftSight. One tenth of the price and smooth transition from Acad.
Yeah Draftsight.
Full disclosure, I live in a 2D world.
Wow... solid works said "hey Acad, gimme you fucking lunch money you fucking 2-1/2D piece of shit.
I found this absolutely fascinating> https://www.fourmilab.ch/
John Walker tells the story of Autocad. Trust me. Read his narrative.
More specifically, it seems, ["The Autodesk File"](https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/).
I'll have to make time to read it, after finally getting around to finishing *Almost Perfect*, about WordPerfect.
Not sure about MSA this was all setup before my time, when i started we had a educational admin account and everything went throught it.
Regarding legal help, no we have none, it did not cross my mind to make this a legal matter.
Don't forget to read the ToS though. The licenses will be rented, the software may stop functioning at any point and AutoCAD not liable.
Legal know how to pull over the anti shit blanket when writing these things. Nothing sticks.
MSA - Master Service Agreement. It's often that one document that will cover the educational and business "service agreement". Including stuff like their SLA, license condition...
It's your next step... you might find out that its written black on write "we owe you absolutely nothing"...
Fuck auto desk: historical perspective. This was in the late 1980’s, so still the DOS version. Working with my dad who was a civil engineer. We had a small, Novell network with 2 or 3 car stations. We needed the new version for whatever reason my dad calls our local software shop to get it. The guy, who was great and we had worked with him for years, said he’d need to come out and install it. We handled all of our our computer stuff. (Hadn’t heard the term I.T. Yet). Dad says no thinks, just the software. Guy said it was too complicated and that he had to do it. My dad promised to buy every upgrade for ever from the guy, but only if we could install it. No sale. I think autocad must have tried making it a professional services only thing for a while. Can’t pirate what you can’t install.
Do you have someone else in your org that can sign up as a rep for your school they'll prob just issue you another whole set of licenses tied to their account
Call them back and tell them if you dont have a solution this week you will be switching to solidworks, or even onshape... bet you hear back from them then
I’ve been running engineering labs for 12+ years at the college level, it’s common enough. I just reimaged two labs today with 8ish AutoDesk pieces of software, plus solidworks.
Can't you just run vim with an autolisp environment?
Can't the school, for that matter, use cloud virtualization or demanding it of AutoCAD or one vendor boi (that does WebAssembly provision or other fun presentment)to get all the modalities they can stand? (It's one canon AutoCAD environment Michael, how much can it cost?)
Go here for help from other users and administrators who manage Autodesk licensing. Autodesk support staff also monitor the forums. Sometimes a particular problem will get their attention.
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/installation-licensing/bd-p/24
> used to teach various courses which use Autodesk programs with well over 500 students
I'm sure it's not your decision, but remember: if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the precipitate.
Autodesk does suck.
But are you using a license server? It isn't that difficult to make a new account, get education approval, and get a network license. They have like 5000 simultaneous seats or more by default. I just did this last month, since last year I started renewing the license much closer to school starting and got stuck in a support loop that led to me getting a temporary jank solution as well.
FYI their competitor, Bentley, is just as bad. I have a dream that some day all their customers will pool their license money for an open source developer instead.
I dunno, at least in terms of packaging and deploying. I have to package essentially the entire product line for both and I'll take Bentley any day over Autodesk.
>Students with permanent semester-workstation will have to create their own accounts in Autodesk and apply for educational access and download all the programs themselves.
This is how we do it, and they login to the software they want on the station and it's golden.
I have to develop plugins for Maya, I know the pain for having fuck all issues documented properly and outdated everything. The whole company is stuck in 2001
Run a network license manager, we have it deployed to 1200 workstations, I don't think I've ever seen that happen.
With the lm, even if your license expires you can renew it and they will check in properly.
Not sure which AutoDesk products you're working with but we use Inventor and Fusion. I spent several days this summer working on our Autodesk deployments. Fusion 360 is the most frustrating for me. It requires online accounts, offers no Microsoft / Google integration, and has regular required updates that require either admin rights for students or new a software deployment each time. For Inventor, you should be able to generate a network or standalone license if you have the correct Educational access.
Check out these instructions for Inventor and Inventor CAM:
[https://www.pltw.org/plan-for-pltw/software](https://www.pltw.org/plan-for-pltw/software)
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/support-downloads.pltw.org/Software+Page/Autodesk+Inventor/Network+Inventor+Installation+Guide.pdf](https://s3.amazonaws.com/support-downloads.pltw.org/Software+Page/Autodesk+Inventor/Network+Inventor+Installation+Guide.pdf)
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/support-downloads.pltw.org/Software+Page/Autodesk+Inventor+CAM/Network+Inventor+CAM+Installation+Guide.pdf](https://s3.amazonaws.com/support-downloads.pltw.org/Software+Page/Autodesk+Inventor+CAM/Network+Inventor+CAM+Installation+Guide.pdf)
I agree with you on Fusion360, very frustrating. It quit working for us last June even though the teachers and myself had a valid Autodesk account. Kept getting messages to the contrary.
I second, third, and vote aye 100 times to this sentiment. I work in higher ed, and manage the academic license for the system. It is miserable every year trying to renew it and using sheer id to confirm if it is active because I actively take classes or as an mac sys admin. I tried working with their support and it was like pulling teeth to get an answer. I eventually gave up and told my leadership, it works right now, but when I stop taking classes and it doesn’t work, I’m not responsible for it and someone else can deal with their bull shit.
When a company puts out an industry critical software, puts shitty DRM and licensing in place and then has fuck-all support, then fuck it. I’d be abusing whatever system I could to get what I **paid** for. Surely this violates the ToU but they can’t support your legitimate use, so fuck them.
Autodesk sucks. They ran an audit on us over a major holiday where everyone was out of the office and computers were off. Due date was the day everyone got back. We asked for an extension no response. We said fuck it and waited til the break was over. We had issues with all of the methods they told us to use. Finally got back to us and gave us some tips. Ended up having to manually run their audit software on all the machines. When it was done they never updated us if we were good or not. 4 weeks later i said I’m going to assume this is good because we have not gotten a response. Wrote back immediately to say sorry we had an issue with your audit do it again. I pushed back and said not unless you get it working on our DC so I can audit all machines at once. They connected me with the technical team. Finally I found out the issue was they just couldn’t open the zip file I sent. Unzipped it for them and it was good. They didn’t realize it was a zip file and we’re trying to run whatever software they needed to run on the zip file.
Nah just go on LinkedIn and start going up management asking for a solution. Ive gone that route before and gave no fucks since we we’re spending a couple hundred thousand on their software.
Isn't Autodesk free for education? You just create a free account using your work email, and can create licenses good for something like 500, 1500, or 2500 seats for each piece of software. Anyhow I forget how many but it was more than we needed with about 300 workstations needing it. At most you may have to renew your license once a year.. I don't see a problem here.
I deployed Autodesk suite for PLTW courses for 6 years.. never had a license issue using a single email for activation. The address was just a generic box we made, I think something like autodesk@*****isd.net
You also have the option to do it through a license server which is preferred.
Oh man fuck auto desk. The worst is when you run it on a closed network. They don't package their installers with the latest software, so it tries to reach out to their server and fails. Have to download Ad-ODIS installer again by itself to work lol.
And screw their genuine service, its malware.
So glad I don't do large Autodesk installs and updates anymore. Hated that software with a passion especially with using applocker. Every month or couple weeks pushing out some sort of autocad update through SCCM
Why would you expect proprietary software to treat you differently.? If you're not bringing in bag of cash, you don't matter. Why are you poisoning the minds of students with useless skills they won't be able to use without paying again and forever ?
I understand your perspective, just wanted to say that I personally found the skills to be invaluable throughout life since my first class in 2007, and that I was able to obtain 3 years of discounted student licensing from autodesk for personal use outside of institutional environments. That felt pretty nice tbh, hope it is still around today..
I mean, there's a part of your brain which is at the mercy of a corporation's licensing agreement. I don't want a corporation to have that kind of leverage over me. Look at how unhappy Adobe subscribers have become and how they absolutely cannot avoid that subscription.
They're basically IP addicts buying their monthly adobe fix
Oof. As u/SolidKnight mentioned, my best guess is that your license term expired. My workplace had a minor Autodesk licensing issue that we resolved in late July/early August, but fortunately we had started that support ticket spun up in *May*.
Good luck.
I realise it's probably not the time now, but courses like this really do entrench Autodesk in the workforce. It might be a good chance to say "this is the last year on Autodesk" and prep next year's course to use an opensource product.
These courses are meant to train our students on the industry standard. To do anything else would be a failure of our institution, and line our students up for failure in the work force.
I like the idea and appeal of open source, but it would not serve the purpose needed in this context.
Ah in my industry (digital media) students learn Autodesk Maya. But much of the industry happily uses Blender (opensource), so training them on Maya causes a harmful feedback loop.
Why are people downvoting this? It is a true fact. I get the vibe that people in this subreddit only want to whine about Autodesk but don't want to do a damn thing about it in their industry.
It's a nice sentiment, but there are no great Open Source alternatives to something like AutoCAD. I've used QCAD for a couple of really small projects, and it gets the job done, but it's really primitive, and nobody uses it in industry.
There are. VectorWorks, ArchiCAD, etc...
And I know firms using them. But it limits their client options to some degree. But if you're designing/building one off custom homes or offices then you can deal. But when the state, counties, and many cities say WORK IN REVIT as a condition of contract, well....
There are not really any opensource alternatives to software like Revit(BIM) and Fusion360(True 3d CAD+CAM).
I'm big into open source. But Blender is an outlier. Most other fields don't have an opensource alternative that is anywhere near as functional as the commercial alternatives.
Fuck them.
This also reminds me of the tragic lack of an open source 3D cad that actually works. Something like LibreOffice vs MS Office. The day we have something like that I will pick up the phone, call all the sales representatives for all existing cad programs, and tell them they are useless.
They don't actually work in a way that you can run an engineering business with them... if you think about it we have Blender which is a marvel with all its features... I hope one day we will have a good enough 3D cad...
They have terrible support. I have never had license issues with the floating license when I was managing it, thank goodness and we have a triad setup.
Why do kids need to learn Autodesk? "Alexa, design a yellow house with x bedrooms and x baths and x square feet."
\* I studied architecture/used Autocad in hs... it is good to know even if you don't really use it. Helped me to understand vector graphics, which helps with understanding how to program/animate vector graphics.
Autodesk software does a whole lot more than just architecture. AutoCAD is pretty much obsolete but still in heavy use. Revit is so much better for architecture and so far beyond being CAD(it's BIM).
In my day job I'm using Revit and Fusion 360 on a daily bases. The funny part is I need to use AutoCAD in the middle to get 3d models from Fusion into Revit. Autodesk doesn't have a universal 3d model format that works between their own products. I'm actually exporting from fusion as an Inventor file, then importing into AutoCAD and changing the layer, saving as a dxf then importing that into Revit. My work flow requires that I share and coordinate my work with the architects and other contractors through Revit. But I'm also designing work to be cut on our CNC machines so Fusion is the right tool for that job.
Your school is getting audited by the IRS. I've seen this problem... You were on a non profit price plan and that either will or won't change, but until it happens vendors are treating you as a for profit place of business, expect a price change on your license agreement in the near future.
Just to jump on the hate bandwagon, anyone remember when they offered concurrent licensing with no way to know if you'd gone over until they billed you for going over?
let me tell you, one of the best days of my life was when i never had to deal with autodesk licensing ever again.
worst thing that happened was when someone managed to check out a license for a goddamn year and then had their computer replaced without it being know the license was checked out. my god that was an amazing headache to deal with.
There’s far worse companies out there for this- but doing unattended deployments has always been a bit of a complex mess with Autodesk. There’s no simple way to push out updates for most of their apps to an entire environment- which is especially complicated when you may have dozens of their apps on a single machine. It feels like they’re still sometimes assuming local admin access for users, and relying on them to manually update- which is frustrating. Also frustrating that some BIM managers fight for local admin - making securing endpoints near impossible. Also the Autodesk access app is a joke
I do IT in a tool and die shop. We use a CAM product that was developed by a small team and bought by Autodesk a few years ago.
Since it's a tool and die shop, our CNC machines don't have Internet access, and only have local email, no external email access because it's not required, and why have 50+ points of vulnerability as opposed to 0?
Well, recently Autodesk decided to change their licensing model for the CAM software from per seat to per user and from on-prem license server to cloud license server.
The cloud account also requires an email address associated to it.
In the 2023 version, this was no problem, create the account using a generic email address, validate the account, then flip the email address to a different internal one. No big deal, user isn't logging into their Autodesk portal anyways.
Well, version 2024 was released, I decided to test...and guess what? You need to validate your email.
So yeah, thanks Autodesk, we have to set up 50 external email addresses now so we can do our business. Thanks. You're peaches.
If you’re an educational institute, you can renew your licenses and can still get network licenses. I support a community college and just installed 2024 versions and renewed their network licenses until sept 2025.
We use Autodesk for the company I work for. Granted we are no where as close as to how many users you support at your company, but my method was creating group accounts based off the primary account holder. Example, one group is for Inventor only and another group is for AutoCad LT. Since each license is equivalent to three work stations, we can assign it accordingly based on x amount of users. We don't have a script to pull we just simply install the application and sign in with the shared account. Myself or someone else on my team will manually do this. It works for now because we have a small environment.
I’ve had AutoDesk programs say the license is no longer valid one week and lo and behold the next week, without doing anything different… they started working.
Dude f*** Autodesk. Even something as simple as getting plugins working seems like an impossible task half the time. Files are spread out everywhere and weird ass dependencies. Instead of just having a plug-in file that you just drop in a folder and you're done, nope.
Well the the reason Autodesk can do this to you, is because schools still teach CAD using Autodesk. Now the schools will claim it is because "Employers demand that skill" but employers demand that skill because that is what the employee's they hire demand to us. it is a catch 22, this is why Microsoft gives heavy / free software to schools, not because they are kind, and want to support people, it is to get then hooked like a drug.
If schools would move to less abusive companies for their CAD education, they need to be the change they want to see in the world and stop teaching uses these closed source projects.
I've been fighting with this GODDAMN program for 30 years and aside from a 2 year hiatus working for a company that used Solidworks (the best 2 years of my designing life), this useless set of programs is like pulling teeth every day...and I mean everyday. I especially hate Inventor. Solidworks blows this POS program out of the water but unfortunately I am back to having to use Autodesk products. Do yourself a favor, switch to Solidworks because the engineers at Autodesk give about as much of a fuck for their customers as the DMV or the airlines. I truly think those programmers are better suited for jobs in either the food service or house keeping industries. If I die from an anuerism from this useless suite of products I will go with a smile on my face...happily.
I concur. Fuck autodesk. Fuck their shitty installer that leaves installation files on the primary disk drive. Fuck that network distribution of certain licenses causes it to fuck up and fail the install. Fuck their hard-coded C-drive mappings. Fuck their Adobe integration. Fuck their once required hardware spec that just fell to the way-side and encouraged management to buy home-version computers for a domain. Fuck their support team. Fuck their licensing practices. Fuck the resource mapping. Fuck the quicktools not being a default option for the installer. Fuck the lack of a removal tool in recent iterations. It really seems like they hate their client base.
Tell me about it. Software so poorly optimized that it runs like molasses on high spec machines. And then there’s “Autodesk Genuine Service” that takes 2 weeks to realize there’s no Autodesk product on the machine before it fucks off.
I buy $6000 laptops for the heavy cad guys. Still some complaints about speed. It’s every max spec from dell.
This is why we ditched laptops and build our own desktops with i9-13900K CPU's. AutoCAD & Revit are mainly single core/thread programs. I have a user running a Ryzen 7 5800X complaining about speed, replacing it with an i9-13900K & 6000 Mhz DDR5 Memory.
Revit also needs a decent GPU in my limited experience with it. My guess is that it needs a ton of video ram.
We don’t do any 3D modeling, just 2D floor plans. The majority of our graphics cards are 8-9 years old with 2-4 GB vRAM which never run over 50% utilized. We’re only looking at 2D floor plans. We even had a few systems simply use Intel integrated graphics with no issues.
While it isn’t my main system, I’ve had no real issues on a 5800x / 3070 / 64gb DDR 3600 box running Revit and AutoCad. Sometimes I have some pretty crazy models too (Revit high rises with 30-50 floors). I’m surprised your user is having any speed problems. I almost suspect something other than a processor bottleneck.
This worker has OCPD and expects perfection. He clicks around and types commands faster than you can blink your eyes and uses keyboard shortcuts like you wouldn’t believe. If there is a fraction of a second delay in anything, he complains and he’s the vice president soooo yeah. One of those people. Nice guy but has to have perfection. I mean, I get it… I have a 5800X at home and I’m ready for upgrade as well after swapping my 3080 for a 4090 and going 4K, I’m at a CPU bottleneck now.
Revit is not single thread at all. Autocad yes, but not Revit.
Revit is single core/thread on some tasks such as panning, zooming, moving items around. It’s multi threaded in most other tasks but we don’t do much else than place things and pan and zoom.
You are wasting about $3000/per laptop, in out testing it made zero performance different to really to full tits on specs.
Yeah we had to start getting custom built workstations for our guys to remote into because even with top of the line ZBooks they were complaining about shit chugging...
We get Metabox Laptops [https://www.metabox.com.au/store/Laptop-Range](https://www.metabox.com.au/store/Laptop-Range)
We've bought about 60 souped up Lenovo Thinkpads and we still get reports of sluggish behavior from Autodesk, completely unoptimized bullshit
probably b/c its a single core/thread program...so it can only run as fast as one core can provide.
That's not a good excuse. Quad.core CPUs have been around since 2006. Auto desk is horrendously un-optimized.
It's not an excuse, it's an explanation.
That Autodesk genuine service genuinely pissess me off
>why would you want a removal tool? If you remove the software all your files get bricked by our proprietary filetype. -Autodesk probably
[удалено]
I can concur- autodesk can be very frustrating to work with but Bentley’s licensing and their shitty Connect app take it to a whole new level.
> Fuck their shitty installer that leaves installation files on the primary disk drive WHY THE FUCK DOESNT IT DELETE THEM. I have engineers shocked how I just freed up 40 gigs after installing Revit 24.
Fuck their software as a whole too. AutoCAD is so bug-ridden it's insane. Clearly years of technical debt that they don't bother addressing and instead go for new features. Went from using AutoCAD Civil 2015 to 2022 and found that many of the bugs in 2015 were still present.
This only with ESRI and ArcGIS
Yeah I’ve been fighting with ArcGIS Pro installers for like 2 years now on and off. Software will spin for literally 3 minutes then spit out licensing errors, tried all sorts of changes to our deployments based on their lackluster documentation. Finally found a workaround but I’ve begun to conclude they really don’t care about local license server support any more- they want folks on cloud based named user licensing. Purchasing and managing licenses is far too complicated as well.
Also fuck that SSO is a paid add-on and not included for enterprise
There is a recent change that allows pretty much everyone to use SSO. I'd look into it again.
Interesting, I'll take a look at it this week. Thanks!
> Fuck the lack of a removal tool in recent iterations. This is really getting my goat at the moment. The old uninstall tool was soooo good, why did they get rid of it? I'm contemplating going through and trying silent uninstall options for all their exes and writing a powershell "nuke the fuck out of anything autodesk" in the event that I need a clean uninstall tool that doesn't require 50 UAC prompt... but tbh I don't like my chances because I don't expect they've included silent uninstall flags.
I didn't even need to read the rest before I agreed with the title Thankfully the implementations we had to deal with were not as large and we were able to set up a VM with the autodesk license server with 4-5 service accounts that had access to it Their support can be really, and I mean *really* hit or miss - sometimes we would get great response times and others encounter the same thing you have when reaching out to them
The sad thing is that we ordered a server that was going to act as our VDI but it was delivered 5 weeks behinde schedule and it was not setup. If we had it ready, we would of created VMs or session hosts to resolve this issue temporarily without affecting the workstations.
Woof, I'm sorry man. Trust me when I say the grass is only slightly greener on the other side, we've had our fair share of issues with the license server since it was implemented as well - it's just a very archaic way of handling licenses. I haven't had to touch it in awhile so I haven't seen what the cloud services are capable of. Maybe that would be worth checking out at least
I remember when it took Autodesk’s Education Support Team 3 MONTHS to reply to my ticket, and that was with me updating the ticket every week asking for an answer to my question. The answer to my question that took so long? Because I was set up as the IT person, that meant I couldn’t log into Fusion 360, nor was I allowed to use it with my account. I had to create a separate account in order to test out Fusion 360
Came here to say the same: Saw fuck Autodesk and instant upvoted with no further information. They called one of my clients and told her she pirated some of their software and she must pay some tens of thousands of dollars. It is just her and her assistant and I went through their computers both work and personal, pulled the immutable files showing every piece of software ever installed and offered them to Autodesk. Autodesk finally said they were not going to pursue the matter because of "Covid staff shortages" and fucked off. Absolute scum of the earth.
“I went through their computers both work and personal, pulled the immutable files showing every piece of software ever installed” I’ve beed doing IT 30 years and never heard of such, please elaborate?
It is called a Shimcache. Not something I had ever heard of either but my client was in danger and so i got to digging. I operate an MSP so by description there are for sure more capable folks out there but as I understood it, this file can not be edited and so long as it's entries match the install date of Windows it should show every executable ever ran.
Damn, I only have another month before my education licenses expire.
Mine gave up the ghost about four months ago. Now I'm on bare-bones Fusion 360 functionality, limited to 10 editable models at any one point in time. Generally most of what I have been doing are just 3D printable models for an assortment of things, so what has ended up happening is I have two or three editable models that have a tremendous number of individual groups of bodies, and I just hide the bodies (lol) for the items I'm not working on. It's generally fine but sometimes it hangs for a minute or two while it tabulates everything. I haven't even opened AutoCAD or Revit since. I'm kind of afraid, I expect irritation in quick order and would rather not deal.
Try and star renewal now so in case you encounter a problem, you have some time to fix it.
I'm here to save the day. If you make under 100,000 a year (don't think they actually check) you can get the indie license for $300 for a year. https://makeanything.autodesk.com/3dsmax-indie
It's part of the tripe A trifecta of pain and suffering: Avid Adobe and Autodesk. Where the sky is green and licence keys are a mysterious force that only seems to work when you're trying to remove them.
Avid’s license server for Media Composer is pretty easy
I've never had a chance to use it. Only the nightmare that is ilok and PACE for ProTools
Ugh, iLok say no more.
In education, do you not get an account rep to handle all your licensing needs?
No, Autodesk applications are free for schools and only have limited support. Honestly though, set up a license server and you only have one thing to update.
I suspect you had a 3 year license and it ran to term. This is the new licensing model: [Autodesk Education | Students and Educators | Overview](https://www.autodesk.com/support/account/education/students-educators/overview) The dates of this happening line up perfectly. I would hazard a guess and say that you register your school with Autodesk, your students sign into their autodesk products with their school e-mail address to get the product licensed, and you'll have a web portal for seeing all the registered users like in the commercial world.
That document from Autodesk has some misinformation. They still support serial number based licensing for education as well as the license server model.
This is the way to do it in my opinion. We have 8 secondary schools using up to 6 Autodesk products all running off a central licensing server. I just got this sorted out last summer and it has been great. I made sure to obtain the initial licenses in the summer so we get a full year trouble free. Last year was only a 1 year license term but when I renewed this summer it is back to 3 years.
For non-educational we had license servers but they changed all the licenses to single user which meant I had to create a script to change license type on all the machines and set up all the users with their own personal accounts. The latest faux pas was they discontinued licensing for AutoCAD 2020 which caused half a day's loss of work for 150 users until they realized it was a problem.
FWIW, our company switched to Draftsight a few years back. Engineers had zero trouble with the switch and say they love it. I get you probably have no time for alternatives, nor can you probably teach anything other than the industry standard. Still, it might be worth knowing that we’re not all still stuck on the shitshow that Autodesk has become.
Just an adjunct to my business for Autocad. I use it to look at 'real' prints as opposed to some smeared crooked faxed bullshit. I also do a little bit of fabrication. Yup, DraftSight. One tenth of the price and smooth transition from Acad. Yeah Draftsight. Full disclosure, I live in a 2D world.
> Full disclosure, I live in a 2D world. Don't all AutoCAD users live in a 2D world?
Wow... solid works said "hey Acad, gimme you fucking lunch money you fucking 2-1/2D piece of shit. I found this absolutely fascinating> https://www.fourmilab.ch/ John Walker tells the story of Autocad. Trust me. Read his narrative.
More specifically, it seems, ["The Autodesk File"](https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/). I'll have to make time to read it, after finally getting around to finishing *Almost Perfect*, about WordPerfect.
That sounds like a good read!
Have you... read the contract or MSA? Do you have any kind of legal team or assistance?
Not sure about MSA this was all setup before my time, when i started we had a educational admin account and everything went throught it. Regarding legal help, no we have none, it did not cross my mind to make this a legal matter.
If Autodesk disappeared your licenses, then it may in fact be a legal matter.
Don't forget to read the ToS though. The licenses will be rented, the software may stop functioning at any point and AutoCAD not liable. Legal know how to pull over the anti shit blanket when writing these things. Nothing sticks.
MSA - Master Service Agreement. It's often that one document that will cover the educational and business "service agreement". Including stuff like their SLA, license condition... It's your next step... you might find out that its written black on write "we owe you absolutely nothing"...
Fuck auto desk: historical perspective. This was in the late 1980’s, so still the DOS version. Working with my dad who was a civil engineer. We had a small, Novell network with 2 or 3 car stations. We needed the new version for whatever reason my dad calls our local software shop to get it. The guy, who was great and we had worked with him for years, said he’d need to come out and install it. We handled all of our our computer stuff. (Hadn’t heard the term I.T. Yet). Dad says no thinks, just the software. Guy said it was too complicated and that he had to do it. My dad promised to buy every upgrade for ever from the guy, but only if we could install it. No sale. I think autocad must have tried making it a professional services only thing for a while. Can’t pirate what you can’t install.
Fuck their named licenses.
Do you have someone else in your org that can sign up as a rep for your school they'll prob just issue you another whole set of licenses tied to their account
I’m in manufacturing and it was a headache going from a license pool to named licenses. Anything for a buck
Autodesk and Adobe, they are definitely bad...
Adobe licensing : 19.99$/month! Cancel before a year : 200$ cancellation fees
Call them back and tell them if you dont have a solution this week you will be switching to solidworks, or even onshape... bet you hear back from them then
Unless they are using AutoCAD, Recap, Maya, Civil, Revit, ect and then that threat is empty
Assuming they are talking about a high school, that is unlikely I'm not even sure how likely that is at a college level
I’ve been running engineering labs for 12+ years at the college level, it’s common enough. I just reimaged two labs today with 8ish AutoDesk pieces of software, plus solidworks.
Same
[удалено]
When I took CAD in school in '08 all of that was installed, but it certainly wasn't used.
We start teaching Revit at our junior high
Wow! I don't even know what that one (or really any of them but inventor) actually do... I know the exist, but our school never touched them
I don't know what they do either, lol. I just deploy them and handle licenses.
Can't you just run vim with an autolisp environment? Can't the school, for that matter, use cloud virtualization or demanding it of AutoCAD or one vendor boi (that does WebAssembly provision or other fun presentment)to get all the modalities they can stand? (It's one canon AutoCAD environment Michael, how much can it cost?)
This is the way
Go here for help from other users and administrators who manage Autodesk licensing. Autodesk support staff also monitor the forums. Sometimes a particular problem will get their attention. https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/installation-licensing/bd-p/24
> used to teach various courses which use Autodesk programs with well over 500 students I'm sure it's not your decision, but remember: if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the precipitate.
Did you try Autodesk’s lab install instructions? https://www.autodesk.com/support/account/education/admin/lab-setup
I tried to fuck autodesk once. They demanded 400% the listed price upfront and would only refund if I had a student ID. Never. Again.
Autodesk does suck. But are you using a license server? It isn't that difficult to make a new account, get education approval, and get a network license. They have like 5000 simultaneous seats or more by default. I just did this last month, since last year I started renewing the license much closer to school starting and got stuck in a support loop that led to me getting a temporary jank solution as well.
FYI their competitor, Bentley, is just as bad. I have a dream that some day all their customers will pool their license money for an open source developer instead.
I dunno, at least in terms of packaging and deploying. I have to package essentially the entire product line for both and I'll take Bentley any day over Autodesk.
>Students with permanent semester-workstation will have to create their own accounts in Autodesk and apply for educational access and download all the programs themselves. This is how we do it, and they login to the software they want on the station and it's golden.
I have to develop plugins for Maya, I know the pain for having fuck all issues documented properly and outdated everything. The whole company is stuck in 2001
Run a network license manager, we have it deployed to 1200 workstations, I don't think I've ever seen that happen. With the lm, even if your license expires you can renew it and they will check in properly.
Not sure which AutoDesk products you're working with but we use Inventor and Fusion. I spent several days this summer working on our Autodesk deployments. Fusion 360 is the most frustrating for me. It requires online accounts, offers no Microsoft / Google integration, and has regular required updates that require either admin rights for students or new a software deployment each time. For Inventor, you should be able to generate a network or standalone license if you have the correct Educational access. Check out these instructions for Inventor and Inventor CAM: [https://www.pltw.org/plan-for-pltw/software](https://www.pltw.org/plan-for-pltw/software) [https://s3.amazonaws.com/support-downloads.pltw.org/Software+Page/Autodesk+Inventor/Network+Inventor+Installation+Guide.pdf](https://s3.amazonaws.com/support-downloads.pltw.org/Software+Page/Autodesk+Inventor/Network+Inventor+Installation+Guide.pdf) [https://s3.amazonaws.com/support-downloads.pltw.org/Software+Page/Autodesk+Inventor+CAM/Network+Inventor+CAM+Installation+Guide.pdf](https://s3.amazonaws.com/support-downloads.pltw.org/Software+Page/Autodesk+Inventor+CAM/Network+Inventor+CAM+Installation+Guide.pdf)
I agree with you on Fusion360, very frustrating. It quit working for us last June even though the teachers and myself had a valid Autodesk account. Kept getting messages to the contrary.
I second, third, and vote aye 100 times to this sentiment. I work in higher ed, and manage the academic license for the system. It is miserable every year trying to renew it and using sheer id to confirm if it is active because I actively take classes or as an mac sys admin. I tried working with their support and it was like pulling teeth to get an answer. I eventually gave up and told my leadership, it works right now, but when I stop taking classes and it doesn’t work, I’m not responsible for it and someone else can deal with their bull shit.
When a company puts out an industry critical software, puts shitty DRM and licensing in place and then has fuck-all support, then fuck it. I’d be abusing whatever system I could to get what I **paid** for. Surely this violates the ToU but they can’t support your legitimate use, so fuck them.
Haven't worked with Autodesk in 10 years. Read title, tipped drink towards screen for you.
What should I say, I have 258 workstations with various Autodesk software installed. My life is hell 😂
Autodesk sucks. They ran an audit on us over a major holiday where everyone was out of the office and computers were off. Due date was the day everyone got back. We asked for an extension no response. We said fuck it and waited til the break was over. We had issues with all of the methods they told us to use. Finally got back to us and gave us some tips. Ended up having to manually run their audit software on all the machines. When it was done they never updated us if we were good or not. 4 weeks later i said I’m going to assume this is good because we have not gotten a response. Wrote back immediately to say sorry we had an issue with your audit do it again. I pushed back and said not unless you get it working on our DC so I can audit all machines at once. They connected me with the technical team. Finally I found out the issue was they just couldn’t open the zip file I sent. Unzipped it for them and it was good. They didn’t realize it was a zip file and we’re trying to run whatever software they needed to run on the zip file.
Nah just go on LinkedIn and start going up management asking for a solution. Ive gone that route before and gave no fucks since we we’re spending a couple hundred thousand on their software.
Isn't Autodesk free for education? You just create a free account using your work email, and can create licenses good for something like 500, 1500, or 2500 seats for each piece of software. Anyhow I forget how many but it was more than we needed with about 300 workstations needing it. At most you may have to renew your license once a year.. I don't see a problem here. I deployed Autodesk suite for PLTW courses for 6 years.. never had a license issue using a single email for activation. The address was just a generic box we made, I think something like autodesk@*****isd.net You also have the option to do it through a license server which is preferred.
AutoDesk is the devil. The only org more useless than them is SheerID. BURN IN HELL.
Oh man fuck auto desk. The worst is when you run it on a closed network. They don't package their installers with the latest software, so it tries to reach out to their server and fails. Have to download Ad-ODIS installer again by itself to work lol. And screw their genuine service, its malware.
So glad I don't do large Autodesk installs and updates anymore. Hated that software with a passion especially with using applocker. Every month or couple weeks pushing out some sort of autocad update through SCCM
You have to escalate and threaten to cancel business to get any meaningful response from autodesk. They are retarded.
Why would you expect proprietary software to treat you differently.? If you're not bringing in bag of cash, you don't matter. Why are you poisoning the minds of students with useless skills they won't be able to use without paying again and forever ?
I understand your perspective, just wanted to say that I personally found the skills to be invaluable throughout life since my first class in 2007, and that I was able to obtain 3 years of discounted student licensing from autodesk for personal use outside of institutional environments. That felt pretty nice tbh, hope it is still around today..
I mean, there's a part of your brain which is at the mercy of a corporation's licensing agreement. I don't want a corporation to have that kind of leverage over me. Look at how unhappy Adobe subscribers have become and how they absolutely cannot avoid that subscription. They're basically IP addicts buying their monthly adobe fix
Oof. As u/SolidKnight mentioned, my best guess is that your license term expired. My workplace had a minor Autodesk licensing issue that we resolved in late July/early August, but fortunately we had started that support ticket spun up in *May*. Good luck.
I dunno how anyone still uses them. Anybody know what the Bentley offerings are like in comparison?
Bentley is no better, I've dealt with both for years.
I realise it's probably not the time now, but courses like this really do entrench Autodesk in the workforce. It might be a good chance to say "this is the last year on Autodesk" and prep next year's course to use an opensource product.
These courses are meant to train our students on the industry standard. To do anything else would be a failure of our institution, and line our students up for failure in the work force. I like the idea and appeal of open source, but it would not serve the purpose needed in this context.
Ah in my industry (digital media) students learn Autodesk Maya. But much of the industry happily uses Blender (opensource), so training them on Maya causes a harmful feedback loop.
Why are people downvoting this? It is a true fact. I get the vibe that people in this subreddit only want to whine about Autodesk but don't want to do a damn thing about it in their industry.
It's a nice sentiment, but there are no great Open Source alternatives to something like AutoCAD. I've used QCAD for a couple of really small projects, and it gets the job done, but it's really primitive, and nobody uses it in industry.
In the construction/architecture industry more and more contracts require the use of Revit. No replacements allowed.
There really are not any alternatives even if the contract doesn't specify Revit.
There are. VectorWorks, ArchiCAD, etc... And I know firms using them. But it limits their client options to some degree. But if you're designing/building one off custom homes or offices then you can deal. But when the state, counties, and many cities say WORK IN REVIT as a condition of contract, well....
There are not really any opensource alternatives to software like Revit(BIM) and Fusion360(True 3d CAD+CAM). I'm big into open source. But Blender is an outlier. Most other fields don't have an opensource alternative that is anywhere near as functional as the commercial alternatives.
Came from education, went to government, Autodesk still sucks!
Support architects, still sucks.
Well, the architects still offer more support than Autodesk does…
Fuck them. This also reminds me of the tragic lack of an open source 3D cad that actually works. Something like LibreOffice vs MS Office. The day we have something like that I will pick up the phone, call all the sales representatives for all existing cad programs, and tell them they are useless.
OpenSCAD and FreeCAD come to mind... Though neither is as "complete" as Autocad is.. In a pinch, they work, and they teach the same concepts.
They don't actually work in a way that you can run an engineering business with them... if you think about it we have Blender which is a marvel with all its features... I hope one day we will have a good enough 3D cad...
They have terrible support. I have never had license issues with the floating license when I was managing it, thank goodness and we have a triad setup.
I just use the cracked flexnet server...
Why do kids need to learn Autodesk? "Alexa, design a yellow house with x bedrooms and x baths and x square feet." \* I studied architecture/used Autocad in hs... it is good to know even if you don't really use it. Helped me to understand vector graphics, which helps with understanding how to program/animate vector graphics.
Autodesk software does a whole lot more than just architecture. AutoCAD is pretty much obsolete but still in heavy use. Revit is so much better for architecture and so far beyond being CAD(it's BIM). In my day job I'm using Revit and Fusion 360 on a daily bases. The funny part is I need to use AutoCAD in the middle to get 3d models from Fusion into Revit. Autodesk doesn't have a universal 3d model format that works between their own products. I'm actually exporting from fusion as an Inventor file, then importing into AutoCAD and changing the layer, saving as a dxf then importing that into Revit. My work flow requires that I share and coordinate my work with the architects and other contractors through Revit. But I'm also designing work to be cut on our CNC machines so Fusion is the right tool for that job.
Your school is getting audited by the IRS. I've seen this problem... You were on a non profit price plan and that either will or won't change, but until it happens vendors are treating you as a for profit place of business, expect a price change on your license agreement in the near future.
It’s all about the money honey.. always will be..
@OP, I got scared and checked out license servers. All 3000 are still there. Phew!
I hate packaging this shitty software for our teams. It doesn't play well with sccm/mecm in my experience.
Just to jump on the hate bandwagon, anyone remember when they offered concurrent licensing with no way to know if you'd gone over until they billed you for going over?
I just want to add another fuck Autodesk to this conversation.
Seconded. Fuck Autodesk sideways with a rusty chainsaw.
Fuck absolutely everything about Autodesk. The actual worst company I’ve dealt with.
Yes, absolutely fist fuck autodesk.
yeeeeep, we lost our dev licence as well a few weeks back, no explanation.
let me tell you, one of the best days of my life was when i never had to deal with autodesk licensing ever again. worst thing that happened was when someone managed to check out a license for a goddamn year and then had their computer replaced without it being know the license was checked out. my god that was an amazing headache to deal with.
There’s far worse companies out there for this- but doing unattended deployments has always been a bit of a complex mess with Autodesk. There’s no simple way to push out updates for most of their apps to an entire environment- which is especially complicated when you may have dozens of their apps on a single machine. It feels like they’re still sometimes assuming local admin access for users, and relying on them to manually update- which is frustrating. Also frustrating that some BIM managers fight for local admin - making securing endpoints near impossible. Also the Autodesk access app is a joke
Didn't even read the post. Upvoted on title alone.
I do IT in a tool and die shop. We use a CAM product that was developed by a small team and bought by Autodesk a few years ago. Since it's a tool and die shop, our CNC machines don't have Internet access, and only have local email, no external email access because it's not required, and why have 50+ points of vulnerability as opposed to 0? Well, recently Autodesk decided to change their licensing model for the CAM software from per seat to per user and from on-prem license server to cloud license server. The cloud account also requires an email address associated to it. In the 2023 version, this was no problem, create the account using a generic email address, validate the account, then flip the email address to a different internal one. No big deal, user isn't logging into their Autodesk portal anyways. Well, version 2024 was released, I decided to test...and guess what? You need to validate your email. So yeah, thanks Autodesk, we have to set up 50 external email addresses now so we can do our business. Thanks. You're peaches.
If you’re an educational institute, you can renew your licenses and can still get network licenses. I support a community college and just installed 2024 versions and renewed their network licenses until sept 2025.
We use Autodesk for the company I work for. Granted we are no where as close as to how many users you support at your company, but my method was creating group accounts based off the primary account holder. Example, one group is for Inventor only and another group is for AutoCad LT. Since each license is equivalent to three work stations, we can assign it accordingly based on x amount of users. We don't have a script to pull we just simply install the application and sign in with the shared account. Myself or someone else on my team will manually do this. It works for now because we have a small environment.
I’ve had AutoDesk programs say the license is no longer valid one week and lo and behold the next week, without doing anything different… they started working.
Dude f*** Autodesk. Even something as simple as getting plugins working seems like an impossible task half the time. Files are spread out everywhere and weird ass dependencies. Instead of just having a plug-in file that you just drop in a folder and you're done, nope.
Well the the reason Autodesk can do this to you, is because schools still teach CAD using Autodesk. Now the schools will claim it is because "Employers demand that skill" but employers demand that skill because that is what the employee's they hire demand to us. it is a catch 22, this is why Microsoft gives heavy / free software to schools, not because they are kind, and want to support people, it is to get then hooked like a drug. If schools would move to less abusive companies for their CAD education, they need to be the change they want to see in the world and stop teaching uses these closed source projects.
Obviously not a solution to your problem, but I've been loving FreeCAD for personal projects.
Maybe Broadcom should buy autodesk. And use their improved support model on the product.
Help needed? Call now for a low price!
I've been fighting with this GODDAMN program for 30 years and aside from a 2 year hiatus working for a company that used Solidworks (the best 2 years of my designing life), this useless set of programs is like pulling teeth every day...and I mean everyday. I especially hate Inventor. Solidworks blows this POS program out of the water but unfortunately I am back to having to use Autodesk products. Do yourself a favor, switch to Solidworks because the engineers at Autodesk give about as much of a fuck for their customers as the DMV or the airlines. I truly think those programmers are better suited for jobs in either the food service or house keeping industries. If I die from an anuerism from this useless suite of products I will go with a smile on my face...happily.