this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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KiCAD; fucking amazing program. In just 4 short years it went from your standard "It's open source so I guess I'll use it", to "holy crap, this isn't just open source, it's GOOD"
FreeCAD - in development for 20 years, somehow still trash.
I am an open source zealot basically, and I can't use FreeCAD. OnShape, Solidworks, Fusion 360, Plasticity...all fucking amazing. I've used them all. FreeCAD feels like taking a flame thrower to your face. And yes, I've used the realthunder branch; and yes, recently. I keep trying to force myself over to FreeCAD (remember...kind of a zealot) and it's been the same story for 8 years at least.
Hell, even Blender with the CAD Sketcher plugin (only in development for like a year) is more tolerable.
I used KiCAD to design one incredibly simple PCB (literally just traces and vias), but while there's huge room for learning and growth, it basically went smoothly once I understood the paradigm. I have watched enough videos to get a feel for FreeCAD, and it could meet my modest needs soon, but everything is still much harder than it needs to be, and there are far too many people to keep happy to let its most popular workbenches become what they need to be.
When I was trying to simply import a DXF to extrude, and it couldn't handle that on either Linux or Windows, I finally gave up and bought a perpetual license to Alibre. Now I just hope they continue to exist in some form sufficient to maintain the Licensing activation server.
I am rooting for FreeCAD, and I'm following it with great interest. It is undeniably better than it used to be (the Ondsel soft-fork is kinda nice), but I'm just hoping it will be competitive for simple part and assembly design by the time my version of Alibre starts to feel long in the tooth. The heuristics, stability, and UI of the commercial suites are just much farther ahead right now.
With as much shit as I talk about it - I really want someone to fork it and fix its workflow issues. It's all kind of there, it's just scattered, and the workflow doesn't make any damn sense.
They need to introduce someone to CAD, watch them crazy carefully, note where they struggle, and improve those areas. The paradigm of "Draw thing on 2D, extrude/cut into 3D" should be dead simple. When you can't even get THAT right, nobody is going to want to use your project.
They need to work on Extrusion/Cut, Dimensioning, Patterning (Mirror, Linear, Circular), Fillet and Chamfering.
Those cover 99% of the shit I need to do. If it could just do those, and let the workflow be smooth - it would be a great program. I WANT it to be usable. I WANT to switch to it!
I know you said you tried Realthunder fairly recently, but a huge push for v1 has been to bring his toponaming mitigation in, in a scalable way, along with UI improvements (but only marginally improving the underlying 1990s Catia paradigm) and Ondsel and others have done some good work on the Assembly bench. Like I said, it's better; it's just not quite THERE yet. I'm going to give it another try when 1.0 is officially released, and I do love having it around. The fact that it works at all is a minor miracle, but Blender and KiCAD show what's possible.
EDIT: Just saw that Ondsel is shutting down, though several of its employees were already FreeCAD contributors.
I have heard this same thing, almost verbatim for a year now. Hell, maybe 2 years at this point.
https://old.reddit.com/r/FreeCAD/comments/zsn91p/regularly_updated_summary_of_merging_of/
Yeah -- Here's just what a quick Google search came up with. FreeCAD has been "Merging the realthunder branch into main!!" for a long time.
That post was from Dec 2022. So yeah. Almost 2 years now. There's always someone defending it, but truth of the matter is that they have to get their shit in order. They move as slow as molasses in winter. You'll likely be 20 years older by the time they merge those changes.
You really want a cackle? -- Go look at the commit history of FreeCAD, and the RealThunder Assembly3 branches.
1 dude is doing more good than like 40 'maintainers' who keep changing minor wording in HTML documents. FreeCAD looks like it's active as fuck, but when you look at the changes they're making, it looks like busy-work. They've lost the fucking farm.
I'm less beatdown about it than you, I think, but I invested several hundred dollars into software for my revenue-free hobbies just to have a stable CAD suite with stable terms of use, and much of it was specifically down to FreeCAD not being what I want it to be. I very much feel your pain. :-)
Yeah, I'm so beat down about it because I just want a proper open source alternative in the CAD space. I do a lot of modeling. Currently I'm using plasticity, as it does the basics, it does it well, and it's a buy once, get upgrades for a year, then decide if you just want to keep the version you have. It was like $100 when I bought it, and I've been very happy with it, as it does the basics, it does it well.
They also developed something called a 'Blender Bridge' which will let you edit in realtime, and then do compositing/textures, etc over in blender. This lets them use Blender as their rendering pipeline, which is super neat. They are the first ones I'm aware of to kind of "openly cooperate" with other open source toolsets like this.
I liked it when I tried it. I did want something with a parametric history, or I might have gone with that. I already had a no-history suite that worked okay that I got on sale off a German shovelware site for EUR20/USD25. As an aside, "3D Pro" is the only version that's worthwhile at all, and then only at about the price I got it.
Yeah, the only one I've seen any sort of development on is Dune 3D, and it's a one-man shop that goes in fits and starts, to judge by its Matrix room. It's also got some quirky workflow and UI issues of its own, and will likely grind to a halt once the dev is content that it can produce the kinds of electronics enclosures he wants to design.
There's also Solvespace, if you trust FreeCAD to fillet and chamfer your STEP files, lol.
OpenSCAD et al are outside my expertise. Conceptually, I understand code-to-CAD. I just don't engage with design in that way.
Basically, you're right. FreeCAD is it. If it turns you off, options are limited.
Holy fucking frijoles. This guy who made Dune 3D has made a better 3D modeler in a year than FreeCAD has done in 20.
While yes -- absolutely it's less powerful. And it looks a little quirky right now - but I was able to play with it and in 10 minutes, understand the workflow and how to make an object with it! That's incredible. And it's only 31mb! HAH!
Thanks for pointing that project out; I'll be keeping a VERY close eye on its progress.