Memes

Check out Ondsel it's a FreeCAD fork that is very polished and has some optional paid teirs for PLM. They are using RealThunder's fix to the topological naming problem and Assembly3 for their assembly workbench. Which works really well on the small subassemblies I've made so far. I've been using it for a few weeks after switching to Linux as my daily driver and loosing access to Fusion360, it's missing a ton of EOL features still, Offsets is a big one for me, but it's getting there.

As someone that's been using CAD for almost 15 years it still takes a bit of a learning curve coming from Softwares like SOLIDWORKS, NX, Creo, or Fusion. But after getting the hang of it and installing some great add-ons from the community to expand the workbenches I'm really loving it. It's built in FEM great for static models. Not replacing ANSYS anytime soon. But fun to mess around with.

Having a solid basis in GD&T really helps you understand why FreeCAD makes certain decisions. Learning DOF rescritions using minimum constraints really sets you up for success. And using OG datums for sketches and then project to surfaces has been a big mindset shift for me that's helped solve a lot of issues I had with the software when I first used it years back.