Personally, I tend to use either Rhino or Illustrator for my actual design work.
I’ve used OpenSCAD a fair bit in the past for parametric work, although I have less call for that these days.
I’ve also found Deepnest.io to be an excellent nesting program, and you pay what you want for it, which is pretty much unheard of in terms of nesting software. It takes some fiddling with to get it working how you want, and it’s not necessarily the absolute best nesting program out there, but it’s good enough for most purposes.
I mostly use Inkscape, I’ve used it for years and am used to it and its free. For raster stuff I use an ancient version of Paint Shop Pro (v5). I dont do much in the way of photo manipulation so it does what I need.
You don’t need anything too complicated or feature rich for sending stuff to the laser.
I use a combination of Inkscape, CorelDraw 2018, and Affinity to work with LightBurn. But I asm finding that I use LightBurn for more and more of the design work.
I primarily use Adobe Illustrator, but I have created some things in Fusion 360 and exported DXFs from there. The process to export from F360 was surprisingly easy and effective. I wish I had more things to create with it.
I use the free version of Onshape parametric 3D CAD for engineering type work, which is most of what laser. It’s a bit like Fusion with a different interface and there are some user generated features that make it easy to generate finger joints and inlays. For artistic stuff I’ve got Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo but learning those two apps has proved tedious.
I have the last version (CS6) of Illustrator that was available to purchase outright - before they implemented Rentware.
We have had several “issues” with our Makerspace (Fab Lab Adelaide) clients’ files surrounding scaling. For some reason Inkscape would not drive our Trotec Speedy 300 so we opened all our clients’ files in Illustrator. Quite often they were scaled down by 20% - which sometimes only became evident after cutting!
However, I like many of Inkscape’s features - particularly the tabbed box maker plugin. I run the plugin in Inkscape, and paste the result into Illustrator.
