[MayeulC]

> Cadence, which (at the time) still had a lot of Win 3.1 era MFC UI elements

I'm not sure how it appeared on windows, but cadence is the kind of software with an extremely long history. I'm pretty sure even recent releases have code that date back to the 70s.

As far as I know, it has always targeted UNIX, then X11, using raw XLIB for drawing? X11 forwarding still seems to be the preferred option for using it.

Anyway, try kicad, which is free and open, it has made great strides recently. You can also look at the gEDA suite, though it may be a bit rough. Commercially, I've also used Eagle and Proteus. LTSpice still is a pretty good no-$ option for simulations (though kicad integrates some barebones SPICE simulator now).

[__init]

X11 forwarding for Cadence's chip layout tooling is practically unusable nowadays! Sub-1 FPS, even on a reasonable 1 Gbps pipe with only 3-4 ms ping. I had to use NoMachine when I was doing that work -- proprietary tooling that does the "simpler" image/video streaming.