I think FreeCad is a great tool once you overcame the initial issues. I think it’s not as user friendly as commercial tools but I think that’s a general issue with smaller projects that don’t have billions of funding.
If you want to support a FOSS alternative, you could engage to make FreeCad better. Make tutorials, report bugs, update the documentation, help with translations, help users on the cmvarious forums and platforms or simply throw in a few bugs for the developers. :)
TBH I don’t like FreeCAD - I fell like it’s like recommending Gimp as a serious alternative to Photoshop. With enough effort and deep knowledge you can almost achieve similar results but you have to invest multiple times as much time. The saving in licencing cost is very quickly eastern up by the increased labour cost.
There is an alternative that has come a long way IMHO, though: BlenderBIM. They are still not quite as good as ArchiCAD and such but it runs natively on Linux and is very neat so far.
Gimp is intuitive to me. I grew up on RISC OS, not Windows, and only later learned Photoshop. Switching was easy for me, and that was before I got into FOSS. It was just free and legal.
I’ve seen lots of people from a Windows only background struggle with it. I agree it’s not like a normal Windows app. Maybe single window mode helps, but I’m not in a place to judge.
GIMP is a serious alternative to Photoshop. Wtf is your problem?
It’s not even remotely an alternative to Photoshop for various reasons. Maaaaybe for personal use I could agree to some degree.
Hell Krita is closer to photoshop than GIMP
If you’re trying to recreate Photoshop, that’s part of your problem. We want an alternative, not something that has an identical UI
Lolno.
Having used autocad for nearly 40 years, I will say they stick it to their customers pretty fiercely. I still use 2010 with 3rd party software to get it to run on win10 at home. I do a lot of solid models and assemblies as well as technical 2D drawings and renderings.
FreeCAD is impressive, but it lacks an easy to use interface. NanoCAD and LibreCAD are not open source but are free and are both better 2D alternatives.
Edit: LibreCAD is open source.
According to the LibreCAD website, it is open source.
Ahh, I was mistaken. Libre is open source.
freecad is like gimp. devs with godcomplex ruin it for the rest of the world. i’d rather use krita, blender etc.
I’ve found the FreeCAD community to be extremely helpful
LibreCAD … not open source
FYI, “libre” means free, as in free speech:
Fuck Autodesk. As a student, I have a Fusion licence but they wouldn’t let me open and export my files because my PC is “no longer supported”. Luckily, Altium’s online CAD viewer allows exporting into KiCAD-friendly formats. A lot of editability and metadata got lost in the process but still good enough.
Freecad is a real no go. Tried it and forced to do something with it. The amount of bugs. And really basic bugs makes using it for professional work a non starter. It basically is a collection of amateur software stitched together with no single part having reached maturity.
Freecad was built on top of a giant library called opencascade. Which is in part the reason why we can’t have dynamic or real time modeling. Everything takes triple the interactions to make than in its commercial counterparts.
Add to that the lack of vision and the different fields of work of the contributors makes its development spread all over the place. Unlike blender, it doesn’t seem like FreeCAD will achieve a breakthrough milestone.
FreeCAD is doing a really substantial rewrite right now to completely revamp their topological naming system, which resolve a meaningful amount of pain points. It may bring it far enough to be a viable option.
We’ll see.
Blender is the gold standard for what a runaway success of foss looks like. I’d love to see FreeCAD get there, but they’ll need significant investment to do so.
Have you tried Ondsel, a wrapped version of FreeCAD? I’ve found it a much easier move from F360 (only a few months ago) than FreeCAD itself, and am now modelling in it quite happily.
I’ve still got some learning curve in front of me but, as with F360, once you master the basics, it’s just a matter of learning a new trick or two for more complex models.
I use it all the time, and it works great.
The problem is that you were trained on autoCAD. I have no prior experience with CAD, so I don’t expect it to be something it’s not
We probably don’t use it for the same work. But I can do way way more work using other software than dancing around the interface clicking a bizzillion buttons before achieving anything. I need realtime dynamic editing and FreeCAD can’t do that.
So what are you going to do about it?
Unless you contribute code or assist existing projects, nothing will change…
Isn’t this just freecad?
Yeah it’s built on freecad
What about LibreCAD? Is it still in the running?
Issue here is that this is very hard to Do. Gotta get paid for that level if software.
