this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Freecad is so awful though. It breaks all the time and forces you to do things "their way" instead of being flexible. I don't like having to use it :/
FreeCAD is still in development, Expect bugs.
The initial release was in 2002. There is a point where you can't use the "we're still making it" excuse anymore.
FreeCAD is a complicated program, providing BIM, CAD, and FEM. These and the topological naming problem is why it's taking a long time to develop.
Sure, that excuse is "old", but FOSS is suseptable to stalls/drops when creating complicated programs. (Take Xonotic, still at 0.8.x).
Okay, so why do I as a user am supposed to expect bugs in 20 year old software? I simply won't use it and instead use the industry standard. Yaknow, which doesn't have those problems and is actually finished.
When a company is on the line, you don't work with something that just happens to not work right when you need it to. Excuses and explanations don't really interes you then.
Your're not. Move to another software or improve it. FreeCAD is nowhere near professinol so using it on a job is dangerous.
I use FreeCAD because Fusion360 is slow and annoying when exporting.
It's your choice to use FreeCAD or not, but shaming FreeCAD that the development is slow is painful.
How does it compare to Onshape?
Haven't tried it. FreeCAD is basically a "whole package" cad system, but it just doesn't work quite often. You try to change a dimension and the entire model just explodes. You add a filet and a refference disappears because an edge now has a different name for some reason.
If you go from the start to the end and don't change anything, maybe don't do something complicated, then it's "simply" really annoying to use. If you do anything else, then it becomes impossible, with you fixing stuff more time than you actually model what you want to.
FOSS is so cool
Yeah, well. That's the issue with it quite often - without money you get programmers that are willing to work for free. Which more often than not makes them either push "their way" to do something due to elitism, or implement something unintuitively or straight up broken. The advantage of it is though - I don't have to pay thousands of euro for FreeCAD like I would for Solidworks. And if you work at a company that as a goal / values has "only free open source software" then you get what you get.
You sometimes also get programmers who have no idea how to make the product they're trying to make, which is I suspect one of the issues with Freecad.