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Since I work with AutoCAD daily I feel like Ive been hearing about FreeCAD for what feels like a decade or two. I cant believe it has been pre 1.0 all this time.
I just treid it a bit. And I have to say its quite incredible how good it got! Still a bit rough but I would say its 30% better than a year ago. But maybe ondsel just got me into the mindset of this program.
Its sad to see ondsel go because I doubt we would be here without them.
I hope the freecad team sees all the incredible feedback and the next few versions will be similar improvements for usabilty!
Wait, what happened to Ondsel? I’ve been using it for the last several months as it just seemed to make more sense than FreeCAD did…
Ondsel was not a profitable product as far as I understood. Which is understandable, but I think they would have needed more time and money to make freecad a real competitor over established cad tools
Both GIMP 3 RC1 and FreeCAD 1.0 in the same month, damn
We got GIMP 3 and FreeCAD 1 before we got GTA VI
I have tried freecad a number of times to replace solidworks as a critical piece of closed source software in hardware development toolchains. I have always struggled. Yesterday someone spent an hour with me at a makespace saying… “FreeCAD has a different way of doing this/try realthunder branch/use symmetry condition/delete all conditions that coincide” … it has been worth years of trying alone. When I started solidworks the reseller gave me a week of training - this is often why complex FOSS software gets a reputation for being clunky, because alone you will spend ages hunting a GUI button in a complex interface.
TLDR: Go outside, go to makespace or a FREECAD conference - meet other people who use open source software - its much easier to use/learn from others than alone.
The best thing about 1.0 is that it has ported most fo the topalogical fixes from realthunder!
When I started using SOLIDWORKS I had 0 training, still managed to make it work. FreeCAD is still frustrating after a lot of effort. But I keep trying, because it’s the only real open source option
Does it support 3D mice?
You can even run some of them under linux with this driver: https://github.com/FreeSpacenav/spacenavd
Keep in min that this sw only supports x, not w/ Wayland. Chk the ticket for detail
Weird, last time I used it with nixos running KDE under wayland. Worked without complaint.
The only problem was, that the service did not start (or wasn’t there). You had to open a terminal and manually type in
sudo spacenavd. After that, everything else was plug and play.
freecad is actually getting fucking good for the price
I kinda want to try it out just as a hobby, is it decent or should I look elsewhere?
No. The people who struggle with FreeCAD struggle because they leaned something else first. Its the same reason Photoshop trained users complain about GIMP while people who learned GIMP first dont complain.
Learn FreeCAD first, and you won’t be handicapped
They struggle with FeeCAD for the same reason they struggle with ANY little change in software-- they simply don’t want to be bothered to learn something new. It’s called being lazy.
I think that’s a little unfair. The bigger issue IMO is that FreeCAD doesn’t quite share the same workflow as other (proprierary) CAD packages, so someone coming from proprietary CAD also needs to unlearn habits that were previously fine but now potentially harmful. For example, adding chamfers and fillets in FreeCAD pretty much should only be done at the end to avoid toponaming issues, which is less of an issue in other packages.
No it’s not. Unlearning old habits and thought processes is always the first step in learning new things. But to be fair, it’s also the most difficult part.
While other CAD packages do have a better failure path to follow, they still can fail at the same points as FreeCAD. And you still really should be following best practices for ANY CAD package to avoid failures. But people are nothing if not lazy. And fillets and chamfers just suck in any CAD package. It’s always been my practice to never add them until I was done with the modeling. And if major changes where needed, I would remove them if I suspected they could even remotely cause an issue during a change to a model.
I do think the point about all CAD packages having failure paths is a little overblown. Yes, you can definitely get proprietary CAD to break but in my experience (at least with Solidworks and Fusion), it usually requires much more complex parts than FreeCAD parts. Post 1.0 the situation is definitely better though.
You’re right that users should try following best practices from day one, but realistically most users are not going to learn everything correctly automatically. They might use an out of date tutorial, or might have just learned by tinkering themselves.
The point I was trying to make was that because FreeCAD operates differently than other CAD programs do to one another and because it’s generally a bit more brittle and demanding of the user, I can’t say I blame anyone for not wanting to switch to it if they already have a CAD program they’re proficient with. You could call it being lazy, but from a practical standpoint there isn’t necessarily a ton to gain for a relatively large amount of time investment required to be capable of using it.
I really hope FreeCAD improves enough one day in the new user experience department. I love the software and have been using it as my tool of choice for years now, but evidently not everyone thinks it’s worth the time investment.
I never have an issue with people preferring a different CAD package over another. For example: I detest Fusion 360 for various reasons even after spending a year with it. We all have preferences, work requirements, and even “vibe” better with one package over the rest. You need to choose the tool that works best for you.
What I do have an issue with is new users that try and have problems and immediately start whinging that “FreeCAD isn’t like what I know. And it needs to be like my favorite” Those are the lazy people that can’t be bothered to learn something new. And they should either expend the effort to learn or go back to whatever they were using or volunteer to code, (it’s open source after all). FreeCAD ain’t for you.
But if you have given FreeCAD, (or ANYTHING new in life), an honest try and you can’t get the hang of it or simply don’t like it. Well, that’s a valid and very fair reason to not use it.
