Solidworks is great until you have to buy your own license. This costs MULTIPLE thousands of dollars. You cannot purchase a "hobby" version that actually gives you the desktop version. I used solidworks up until my company license got pulled. Additionally im not a student anymore so no luck there.

I used to use Fusion - but it was never as nice as solidworks. My student edition expired and now im out of that to.

Now I use FreeCAD on Mac. Takes time to adjust and I cannot model as quickly, but saving $$$$

Most of his contributions to the topology fixes got merged back into freecad now, but his enhancements to UI/behavior aren't (yet), and they make a night and day compared to ondsel too.

I didn't find any significant limitation to RealThunder's assembly3.

In any case, while far from most commercial offerings, FreeCAD is progressing and the future looks bright. I've stopped using f360/onshape in the last years for my hobby designs. Once you know the specific limitations of freecad+occt (something you learn in each cad program) and how to work them around effectively, it's already pretty powerful.

Not trying to disrespect the other FreeCAD developers, but it seems like things have improved remarkably since ondsel started taking a more active role.

The project seemed to exhibit a (common) impulse to prioritize extensibility too much. The "workbench" architecture and python API let you do some really neat stuff if you're willing to dig into the weeds. But, from the perspective of a community outsider (so take it with a grain of salt), the development process seemed to be a good example of Conway's Law in action. The workbenches let everyone have their own sub-projects to manage without stepping on each other's toes. This led to a lot of resulting complexities, inconsistencies, and instabilities, which made the approach a net negative (imo) in terms of tradeoffs.

With ondsel, there's been more focus on holistic improvements and getting the individual modules working together more smoothly, which I greatly appreciate.

Freecad on Linux is great, and for commercial packages, onshape on chromium on Linux runs better for me than fusion on windows did.

I use it most days, and am very happy with it. Although I'm not an actual designer and I don't have a great deal of experience with other CAD software.

They also recently raised the price of a real license by making you purchase a couple years of updates (which are typically ~worthless as a user). I was half prepared to swallow the $4k or so but that extra bump made me balk again.

There is no moderately priced, fully featured CAD on the market. Unless FreeCAD has recently overhauled their UI, it is immensely painful to do things which are 2 clicks in Solidworks.

Just trying to model a very basic part, I feel like I'm constantly fighting the software trying to figure out how to get it to understand what constraints I want, or why it won't accept something that feels like it should be obvious. Or jumping through hoops like linking figures across sketches rather than being able to use parts of a single sketch for separate features. Sigh.

One of the first tutorials I went through was really frustrating though. Some of it may be that Plasticity is a quickly moving target right now (lots of tutorials are for v0.x or 1.4, with current being v24, for an idea).

A lot of the pain was this tutorial just didn't touch on the basics it was assuming you knew. Some of it was just getting used to the tool and figuring out what mode you are in and which you need to be in to accomplish what you need to do. I struggled a lot with just getting keyboard shortcuts and the trackpad navigation to work. I never did find a description of mouse/trackpad mappings (possibly made worse by there being ~5 themes you can select from).

It shows a lot of promise, but there's going to be a bit of a learning curve. But there was a learning curve on TinkerCAD too, I just need to keep that in mind.

Pricing is ok: free 30 day trial, $150 for a license with 1 year of updates, and $299 for the Studio license. I don't use CAD that much, like maybe a model a month or less, so it's kind of a big bite to take for me personally, especially with it being young and likely to need to spend $150/year for a while here as it's revving up. The Studio version's xNURBS feature seems like it might be really enticing, but just makes that even harder for me to bite off.

I probably should try OnShape just because they do have that free plan.

I'm also looking at OpenSCAD for doing parameterized models. I installed it last night and asked Perplexity AI to generate a model, and it made a good start at it, but couldn't quite get the tongue-and-groove right.

So we are now in the process of switching to Creo which, while being a user experience nightmare, is so much more stable and runs faster than Solidworks.

Agreed about FreeCAD, the user interface is terrible and even though Ondsel exists I just can't stand the way the program works. As much as I want to use FOSS software there really isn't much that beats the commercial products if you have access to them.

FreeCAD seems to operate in the same way as Catia (ie v5/v6), or at least have been developed to follow the same approach to things.

Saying that as I used to use Catia years ago, so the FreeCAD approach wasn't completely foreign.

Now why would anyone choose that program as the one to base theirs off of, it isn't like Pro/E and SolidWorks weren't around in 2002 when they started FreeCAD.

That's reportedly been fixed (guess they picked a winner?), but I haven't taken a look since. I probably will, at some point, but I generally have a different focus these days.

I just checked their site and their 20% off prices actually seem reasonable—at least before realizing they are yearly costs.. They do sell also perpetual licenses where you pay for the product of your selection and then a yearly maintenance fee, and this would perhaps make the most sense for a hobbyist, but this already feels a bit expensive.

I've been trying to get into FreeCAD, but some of my existing models seem to be a bit slow with it, not to mention the different workflow. But I'll give 1.0 a shot!

I tried it for a while, and while I generally liked it, also got stumped by the artificial limitation of STEP import/export, which made it a non-starter even for hobby projects. This is, IMHO, the dumbest thing they could do in terms of licensing.

Yes, that's right. Weird that a business making powerful software is targeting that market and not hobbyists.

Admittedly, it's been 2 years since I last used FreeCAD, but I've spent literally more than a hundred of hours with it trying to make it do what I wanted it to do only to come to the conclusion that mechanical CAD probably just wasn't for me.

And then I tried Onshape and, surprise, it wasn't me after all.

Needless to say, for a business a few or even several thousand dollars a year is practically nothing if it's critical to business operations and ensuring productivity.

If you're buying this for your own personal use? Yeah, you're gonna need a lot of disposable income or some really good justification. For your own small business use? Yeah, you're gonna need to justify that cost against your estimated annual income and other losses.

To that, I say that is irrelevant because just like you said: It's the company that buys and pays for the license, not a singular employee on a salary.

The salary of the employee provides the basis of their cost to the company, so any tool that increases their productivity for a small portion of that cost is something they are going to consider.

I wasn't imagining that the typical person making $60k year would enjoy blowing thousands of dollars on a CAD package. This is why they aren't cheap though, because typical people don't buy CAD packages, companies do.

I do expect them to do a pull-rug on the free license at some point, like fusion did, especially now that they've been bought by PTC. If they do, the commercial license is too expensive IMHO compared to other offerings for what they offer.

I had the option to use the educational license at some point, but we couldn't get to renew it (ironically, we got a dirt-cheap Creo license afterwards).

Just to keep things in mind it can go anyday from free to too-expensive.

I had a few complex designs in fusion360 I essentially lost at some points due to the price hikes. I decided to endure the pain in freecad. It's getting better.

As far as commercial software goes, my current favorite CAD software for hobby use is Rhino[1]. It's not parametric[2], but it's stable, fast[3], can import and export a wide variety of 3D file types, and it's pay-once-per-major-release. It's not cloud-based. The marketing around it seems to emphasize design/architecture/artistic use cases, but it also works well for dimensionally-accurate mechanical parts.

For those eligible for a student license, the pricing is reasonable (cheaper still if you shop around among third-party edu software vendors). Surprisingly, the student license also allows commercial use.

1. https://www.rhino3d.com

2. Well, Rhino is not parametric in the usual sketch-based way. People do wild things with the Grasshopper plugin.

3. Rhino also runs on macOS, w/ hardware acceleration of graphics via Metal

The workflows in FreeCAD are completely irregular and alien compared to those others. It's incredibly frustrating to use and I have had zero luck becoming fluent in it.

There is a "personal" version of Fusion 360 which isn't tied to enrollment. It has some limitations (only 10 "active" documents; some advanced features are locked), but overall, I think that's still the most accessible entry to CAD for hobbyist makers, especially with all the tutorials for it out there.

I think that with the current state and trajectory of FreeCAD/Ondsel, they have a realistic chance of catching on. However if FreeCAD really wants to be the version that is installed (rather than Ondsel), I think they really have to get to a more regular release cadence.

Edit: I can google that. I was just surprised that I've been using the stuff at work for over a decade and I am juat now hearing about it.

I've dabbled with OnShape, FreeCAD, and SolveSpace, and of them SolveSpace is the one I've ended up using the most. OnShape was nice, the GUI was pretty intuitive, I liked the way it worked, but I just feel weird trusting anything to a free plan on a cloud service. I don't really mind the public part, but it always felt tenuous that the plan would remain free so I didn't really feel like I could trust it long term.

FreeCAD was complicated and opaque, I never really put in the time to learn it, it just felt a bit clunky, but I keep meaning to come back to it.

SolveSpace seemed a bit mysterious at first, but just a bit of learning and I found myself pretty comfortable with it. It's not nearly as fully featured as some of the others, but it clicked well for me.

SolveSpace and FreeCAD are both FLOSS software.

FWIW, I agree on the free platform thing. I can't bring myself to put my actual projects on there.

Re: Mac: SOLIDWORKS runs perfectly well in Parallels on M1. I moved from Fusion and it's been great. Just having fully working G3 surfaces/constraints [3] and patterning on sketch points alone is worth the expense.

[1] https://www.solidworks.com/solution/3dexperience-solidworks-...

[2] Recently Autodesk changed the policy and now Fusion360 will remove your files if you don't pay and not log in for a year.

[3] Something that I don't think we'll ever see in FreeCAD, considering the pace of Open CASCADE development https://git.dev.opencascade.org/gitweb/?p=occt.git

But I can almost never get it to work for me. Every time there is a new major release I try it only to rage quit two hours later. Really hope they get someone to help them with stability and UX improvements like Blender did.

Stability is good in the latest dev builds on the Mac, though 0.21.2 is the least crashy I've seen it.

But if you mean stability in terms of model stability/robustness when changing things, that's improved a lot with the topological naming mitigations.

It's still not perfect, and I still think FreeCAD is a lifestyle choice. But I enjoy working in it a lot more.

The Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube are very, very worth a watch if you feel inclined to have another go; they have been the best thing for getting my mind into how FreeCAD works as a package (in the sense that it is a "package" at all -- it's really still a collection of overlapping, macro-programmable toolsets gathered around a kernel).

But FreeCAD was just not that sort of project. It's a C++ and Python wrapper around a CAD kernel, supporting a set of tools -- some frustrating tools, some quite powerful or niche, like the ThreadProfile workbench or the guitar workbench -- and it has never bothered the highly technical community of users much to unify things.

They weren't really trying to make a major competitor to commercial CAD: they were trying to have the tools that they individually needed and collaborate on the problems they had in common.

The balance has markedly shifted since 0.18 and now there is that focus, and significant commercial impetus. In the time I have used it -- about three years on and off -- it has clearly become more of a focus to make a complete product.

ETA: there is no doubt that one of the major things that needs to be resolved is the duality between Part workbench and Part Design workbench flows.

There appear to be some discussions about this -- about how to either merge them or create a new, future workflow that makes better use of them.

The crux of it has always been that a section of the community thinks the Part Design feature-oriented flow is a bit of a crutch, being as it is implemented as a set of implicit booleans on top of the basic flow.

Part Design is more fun to use for a beginner, but it is definitely not faster, and one of the real problems is that once you are in the feature flow you are kind of stuck in it -- it's possible to merge in objects made in the Part flow but only in relatively basic ways (starting a PD body with a "base feature", or fusing the PD body with the non-PD stuff at the end).

I would expect future development to look at this much more seriously, but there was and is no point in getting into it in more depth until the major TNP issues are truly behind FreeCAD, because a feature-oriented flow especially relies on there not being problems there.

TNP is really a research-grade problem that all CAD packages have to mitigate -- you can I think still run into issues that stem from face/vertex naming in all CAD packages if you really push them, and there are pathological cases where the solution is only to be consistent in arbitrary choices.

But mainline FreeCAD had no solution for this. A solid proof-of-concept implementation has existed in RealThunder's fork (which was originally used for Assembly 3 development) but since the solution touches an awful lot of the code it was never ported across and got increasingly difficult to port. There was reluctance to just switch wholesale to his fork because it contains some somewhat contentious developments, and it has taken some very deliberate, considered rethinking of the organisation of mainline FreeCAD releases to get the TNP code ported, which it now is.

There are still TNP issues, and there are still things one should not hope to rely on in FreeCAD -- like building on faces generated by chamfers, drafts or thicknesses.

I also think what risks being lost is the wisdom of sometimes deliberately choosing to build some features of a part from the base planes rather than a generated face; it reduces the complexity of dependencies and allows much freer re-working.

I've honestly wished I could use it to make vector graphics sometimes, but that also needs some of the basic elements of CAD (parallel edges, radius constraints etc). It's so close to parametric modeling too, with the mesh modifiers, drivers, and now geo-nodes.

Of course, I believe there are a few CAD plugins, but I've never used them, so I can't speak to their efficacy.

Back in 2020 someone submitted code to get it working, in order to make solid modelling possible:

https://archive.blender.org/developer/D6807

Unfortunately it looks like no official Blender developer ever took the time to review it, let alone merge it.

Super unfortunate, as it was only about 15 lines changed. Probably would have needed at least one revision though, as one of the changes was just commenting out some lines. That'd likely have needed to be a better conditional instead.

https://www.cadsketcher.com/

Even FreeCAD has some fundamental differences (and lack of functionality) between it and other mainline CAD programs.

Hopefully someone with more knowledge and experience than me can hop in and explain more, I'm just a CAD user, not a CAD kernel developer.

3D modelers like blender (or even OpenSCAD) work with a bunch of triangles - there is often not some higher level representation of the geometry. You could put a drill hole in a part, but it ends up as just a ton of triangles that approximate that drill hole, vs. a file format which semantically encodes "there is a cylindrical drill hole at this location, with this vector direction, and this radius".

That's what things like BRep (Boundary Representation) and STEP files give you is that semantic data which describes the part "here are the edges, faces, dimensions, etc.", vs. "here's a bunch of triangles, good luck machining this"

This is very much how I internally understand it and explain it to people, yes!

It is a good analogy for e.g. why it's often a challenge to get something milled with a CNC when you only have an STL file.

STL is like a PNG line drawing: it can be high quality, but it's not describing the drawing. STEP is like SVG: it's more effort to render it, but it contains the instructions to draw it.

The other part is that FreeCAD is still this "enter numbers by hand and hope for the best" CAD tool. When you perform an extrusion, there are no visual arrows to pull the extrusion along. When you do a pocket and it goes in the wrong direction you just see nothing, instead of a transparent preview of the operation that is being attempted.

I say this as someone who built a design in the Assembly 4 workbench using dozens of individual parts and probably redesigned every part at least twice. Sure the official assembly workbench is a good idea in the very long run, but they fixed none of the short term pain points I have. You know, things you run into every single damn day. Meanwhile migrating to the new assembly workbench will cost me even more time. I.e. there are switching costs but hardly any benefits.

You can use "LinkGroup" to group a bunch of them together so that they move as one unit.

This reminds me of iirc KiCAD 5 to KiCAD 6. Overnight it went from some weird clearly-Linux program to become a viable product, an excellent one even.

KiCAD uses FreeCAD on the backend for things.

I’d love to see FreeCAD take the same path!!!

However… when I looked at it last year the “let’s draw a cup” tutorial was so pathetically bad I closed it and went right back to solidworks without a second thought.

Programmers like to work on problems which are technologically interesting, and they love adding new features. Dealing with technical debt and solving UX/UI issues isn't as much fun, so in a Bazaar model they'll simply not do it. The result is a product which feature-wise is very powerful, but UX-wise an absolute nightmare to use.

But when there's a party genuinely interested in the product as a whole, they can push more Cathedral-like UX-focused development. Have a handful of devs focus on UI stuff for a year or two, and it has suddenly turned into a world-class product. Blender and KiCad have gone through this before, and it seems like Ondsel is pushing something similar for FreeCAD. Let's hope it works!

I can make FreeCAD go, but we still have to manually create dimensioned printsets for our sheet metal shops, rather than just being able to hand off a drawing file. I feel like when we get to the point of just being able to hand off a drawing file, it'll be in a much better place.

I have milled some basic things using the FreeCAD CAM on a ShopBot 2416 and small custom grbl based CNC. Many years ago now, but things generally look better now. Otherwise I have exported geometry and used external CAM software like VCarve

Then there are smaller frustrations like this confusion between "Part workbench" and "Part design workbench" and unhelpful python errors when you try to do something. But I am sure these will be fixed sooner or later. I think once the UX gets an overhaul it will be 90% there!

I'm not sure what the popularity of these different CAD softwares are. I've seen quite a few hobbyists use OnShape recently, and a few people use OpenScad. I don't think I've seen another FreeCad user in real life though.

That said, each release continues to improve it just has further to go than most open source projects.

I do wish more of the code-CAD people would look at Replicad, Build123D and CadQuery.

I personally like FreeCAD a lot, but I won't push people onto it; if they like TinkerCad that's fine.

I actually switched via CadQuery: a few minutes with that made it clear that the bits I didn't understand (edges, faces, planes, all that stuff that freaked me out) were simple and logical and had a sort of common sense integrity, and that I might as well try to learn them in the context of FreeCAD.

Had Build123D existed at that point, or Replicad, maybe I'd have pushed on for longer. Build123D is my "fallback toolbox" at this point.

I don't think OpenSCAD can produce STEP, ever. Importing it is another matter; that's a one-way meshing operation. But creating it means having a kernel that understands more than CSG operations -- a bRep kernel like OpenCASCADE, that FreeCAD/Replicad/CadQuery/Build123D etc. use.

You can of course run your OpenSCAD in FreeCAD, but certain operations (hulls, Minkowski I think?) end up as meshes, because there is no easy equivalent. Still, that's better than every operation ending up a mesh.

I have no interest in browser based CAD programs because as models become complex, that platform is too limited in performance.

Python and stateful CAD drawings sound like a nightmare to me.

OpenSCAD has limitations for sure, but I think a better tool will look different.

I do wish OpenSCAD used a more general purpose programming manager.

It's also embeddable as a library, which means being able to make web-based object customisers: client-side, script-driven tools that don't require CAD knowledge for the user. Like the Thingiverse customiser but on steroids. It's a fascinating project.

And I think it's not the statefulness that is the significant thing about CadQuery and Build123D. It's the access to a bRep kernel, so you can do operations with faces and vertices, you can reflect (analyse, measure) the model, etc.

Being able to do operations on a generated face or edge means not needing to know (or recalculate) the location of that face in 3D space; it saves you so much in the way of maths.

If you have very simple (or very mathematical!) models, OpenSCAD can help. But once things get complex you just have file after file of variable definitions.

Functional flows on vertexes, edges and faces created by previous operations is much closer to a code equivalent of GUI CAD.

OpenSCAD integrated manifold into its codebase though you would need to use a development build to actually use it since the last release is in 2021. I heard manifold is significantly faster than CGAL.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t appear stateful to me. The context managers mostly make the organization of objects be reflected in the organization of the code.

They’re stateful in the sense that some bits are part of a larger assembly, but I think that’s inherent in the domain. The features of the object have to relate to each other so it knows how to stitch the object together (eg which side of a face is external and which is internal).

Build123d has stateless algebra mode. And you could replace math with simple construction elements and simply ask intersection points.

I wish we had something like it that could be used to create freeCAD macros, as in "Here's a sketch, which FreeCAD translates to OpenSCAD arrays, then runs a script that can do stuff with this model as input"

I have a lot of criticisms for OpenSCAD but I wouldn't call it a counterfeit, it's just a code-based approach to constructing something vs. a GUI-based approach.

It's much more of a one way conversation, if you can't imagine all the rotations to make a part do something, trial and error is very slow.

Whereas in GUI CAD you mostly only have to be able to think in 2D.

And without a constraint solver, you have to have a much deeper understanding of all the spatial relationships involved.

Your object is not something that can then be used to iterate on, except by placing it in space and adding or subtracting other stuff to/from it.

Have you looked at Build123D or CadQuery?

Both are Python packages (different API styles, compatible underpinnings) that do OpenSCAD-type things, but using the OpenCASCADE bRep kernel, so it is less "counterfeit" -- if you want to do something based on a face or edge or vertex that was the product of a previous operation, you can. Both have some constraints support.

In many ways they are both just a prettier alternative to the FreeCAD Python APIs -- indeed there was a CadQuery workbench for CadQuery 1.x.

It's like the BASH of 3D, if I'm doing anything with code CAD, it's probably trivial enough that just using what everyone else uses makes sense, even if almost any other alternative is much nicer.

This is a little bit of why I jumped to FreeCAD from OpenSCAD -- the existence of prebuilt distributions of FreeCAD, and the realisation that I'd always be able to script FreeCAD if I needed it.

Though I think Build123D has the beginnings of momentum (I also think it's not hard to see why):

https://github.com/phillipthelen/awesome-build123d

But OpenSCAD is a terrible, obstinate "standard" choice; I wish it were not seen that way, don't you? Because it's holding everyone back.

(This does make me realise that maybe working on an Electron-based Replicad desktop app would be a good use of my time.)

A debugger would be very helpful to be able to step through the code.

I looked around through a couple of open source/free offerings and all found them frustrating. Either the focus on easy of use was too limiting, the focus was too much on blob, clay-like modeling rather than strong parametric models (many online tools), or they were too pushy to make you pay, or the UI was not intuitive (FreeCAD).

OpenSCAD was the one which allowed me to get the model done, and I loved the code-first, parametric-first approach and way of thinking. But that said I also found POV-Ray enjoyable to play around with around the 2000s. Build123D looks interesting as well, thanks for recommending that.

This really expands your options for what you can make and who you can ask to make it. There are now some online fabrication places that will do CNC from mesh formats, but really the only way to have proper control is sending them a STEP file.

I know they've been obnoxiously chipping away at the features available in their Personal edition and introducing artificial limitations. But my free installation still works and I haven't seen any indications that it's going away.

There are some export formats that it uses cloud machines for, which I think is silly and arbitrary. It's probably done that way to upsell their premium product for faster wait times or unlimited quota. For my uses I was able to select formats that didn't require the cloud.

Fusion is much more polished compared to FreeCAD and so I'm not sure if I'll ever end up making the switch. But I'm glad to see a free alternative, just in case.

Once it's gotten into that hole it will often refuse to export any other format until connectivity is restored, even if the app is restarted. It's known behaviour, for example the official guidance is that changing binary to ascii might help, or you shouldn't export directly to a slicer when offline, or don't use certain menus. But it seems like a wontfix.

Note, however that their nightly builds are much faster, if you enable Manifold (a replacement CSG library that is much faster). In fact, a current design I'm working on wouldn't be possible if I hadn't switched to their nightly builds.

My biggest gripe is that it still feels like a bit of a bag of squirrels (changing workbenches can still lead to unpredictable results and importing STEP is still buggy).

For real, because I am way more productive with FreeCAD. FreeCAD allows to work in term of topological features like surfaces, edges, etc which is, in practice, very cumbersome with OpenSCAD.

I am using Freecad for Actual Real Things. I learned to work around the topological naming issue, but it cost me time, and it can make parametric models quite brittle (ie. a minor change can break the model).

* topological naming issue mitigations -- this is mostly solved enough that you can rely on it, though there are definitely still times when it makes more sense to use sketches offset from the base planes

* the new integrated Assembly workbench (and solver) though I've not dabbled with this myself

* really significant improvements in the sketcher (easier dimensioning, curved slots, polar arrays and improvements to the array tools controls, offset/scale, automatic midpoint constraints)

* support for bodies with multiple non-overlapping solids in Part Design

* useful subtle improvements to Part Design array tools

* some support for operations (pads/revolves/pockets) on only selected shapes from a sketch in Part Design

* I don't do CNC yet but I think there are improvements in the CNC workbench that would benefit hobbyists.

I would put the UI improvements somewhere lower down the list, frankly, than they do, because I find them often confusing and regularly frustrating on laptop screens, but:

* the new dark theme is really nice

* OpenTheme's dark theme works well

* quick transparency toggling is helpful

* and the optional tab bar for workbench switching helps make various disparate workbench tools just that much quicker to get to, somehow, making it all feel a little closer-knit

FreeCad badly needed this. I will try it out.

Any complex drawing quickly go out of hand without assemblies.

Also, finaly there seem to be some real measurement ulitity! 'Std Measure'.

I've gone made trying to build some parts I made in FreeCad without a sane way to measure distances.

I so want FreeCad to kick some entrenched corp ass.

My first tip for most people would be to start with the Part Design workbench, although if you're coming from OpenSCAD, you might prefer the Part workbench. FreeCAD has many different workbenches for handling various use cases, such as architectural models, surface trimeshes, 2D machine shop drawings, and so on. The various workbenches do mostly work together well, but for a beginner it's intimidating to have so many options.

"Part Design" is probably the most familiar approach for people coming from high-end CAD programs like SolidWorks; it uses the 2D sketch + extrude workflow. The similarly-named Part workbench is for people who prefer to think in terms of boolean operations on solids, which is generally the OpenSCAD way.

I make some pretty basic things to 3d print with FreeCAD and everything I've learned came from YouTube.

Typically for me it just new part, new spreadsheet, part design, sketch with dimensions parameterized from spreadsheet. Pad or some other boolean of solids, repeat starting at new sketch.

So, an app to deliver the various versions of the code, followed by an app to set the env vars for the job in hand, followed by an app to tweak, say drive letters and other things and finally another one to start the interface. All of that lot is defined within a GUI. You could capture the env vars through a "snapshot" - basically a diff. from before and after an application installation on a test machine. Nowadays you'd probably use Ansible and a lot of guesswork and farting around.

I'm a sysadmin but I have been trying to get to grips with FreeCAD for years. Mind you, I once got my parents to buy me a 80287 maths co-pro. so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2(?) I gather that the FreeCAD kernel can now deal with a lot of weird stuff and not go mad when you make ill-advised constraints.

As for emacs/vim - not for me mate! I compiled emacs on a Pentium II and decided against it after a while. I tolerate vim because it is ubiquitous, but then so is dandruff.

I'm personally using Fusion 360 and OpenSCAD.

For some background, for about ~3-4 years (~5 years ago) I started using FreeCAD 1.18.1 in my job (and even more before that for hobby use). I am used to using open-source software with bad UI, so that's not my major complaint. As long as you stick mostly in the Part Design, Part, and TechDraw workbenches, you should get used to the UI. I used the main branch of FreeCAD up until 1.19.1 but then switched to RealThunder's LinkBranch [2]. I switched for the topological naming fixes (some introduced in this 1.0), assembly workbench (not the same as in this 1.0), and other many quality of life fixes (multiple solids per body and 3D offsets for most Part Design boolean operations). It was never great but it got the job done. As long as you never need complex organic 3D surfaces, FreeCAD can work - or at least the LinkBranch did for me, I'll have to test 1.0.

However, my biggest complaint is with the CAD engine FreeCAD uses: OpenCASCADE (OCCT) [1]. As with most CAD engines, this thing is OLD. It does not like to make NURBS surfaces with true tangency to other faces, and it really doesn't like when fillits cross edges into other faces. You will spend hours adjusting cosmetic geometry so that dress up features like fillits and chamfers will apply. Unless some group of PhDs with some hardcore C/C++ experience come along or the company that develops OCCT gets some major funding, I don't think FreeCAD will improve enough for day-to-day design of complex parts for a long time.

Nowadays, I use Fusion 360. I prefer SolidWorks but Fusion is all my job offers me currently. For a CAD package, and coming from years of FreeCAD, Fusion 360 just works. I have tools for making arbitrary complex surfaces (could still be better), I can create fillets that cross into other faces (most of the time), and I can go back in history and edit features and my model will rebuild itself (to a limit, but even the FreeCAD LinkBranch had more issues than Fusion even though it was better than vanilla 1.19.1 and 1.20 FreeCAD). Fusion also has a proper assembly system, which is essential! You can cheat and create parts in FreeCAD by linking sketches to geometry in other parts, but it can only get you so far before you need to go back in time and everything breaks upon a rebuild.

I hate to say it, but FreeCAD has a lot of work to do other than the UI. I want to use FreeCAD but it wastes too much of my time for professional work. I would still use it for simple hobby projects.

I could talk for hours on this stuff.

[1] https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/OCCT

[2] https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases

Has anyone else taken this combo to the next level? I'm curious to know if there are any brick walls I'm not seeing yet. Are there limitations or challenges that come with scaling up this approach? Would love to hear about others' experiences with OpenCAD + AI in 3D printing.

Great work! Happy to see this, open and free tools make the world a better place.

I knew I was in for a bad experience when I opened it up for the first time and I couldn't even select some components of the screen because the high resolution DPI monitor made some things unclickable because the pixel boundary box was impossibly small.

Pretty low compromise in terms of portability; surprisingly good on Mac, has ARM support. I think on FreeBSD/OpenBSD as well via ports.

It is a bRep GUI CAD system with 2D drafting, 3D CAD, a technical drawing workbench, FEM, mesh tools etc., and now a core CAD assembly tool. It has a "workbench" (think GUI plugins for specific task) approach, supports macro recording of Python macros, has many third-party workbenches, It is constraints-based and fully parametric: designs recompute and reflow when underlying measurements change.

It's also a 20 year labour of love by a bunch of CAD users.

If you are familiar with QGIS, it's really a lot like that but for CAD. It's less like GIMP than some people say, but it is a bit like GIMP (and like GIMP, is in a long battle with a core architectural problem; FreeCAD 1.0 includes a big victory over its worst core problem)

The 'download now' button is right on the home page above the fold. When you click it, you see three huge icons for window, linux and macos. Not sure how you could've missed that, but it's there.

As for your other points, FreeCAD's homepage does explain what this software can do. It says what this software is right on the first screen. You can scroll down past the first screen to see more info. Even more info is on the Features page that is right in the main menu at the top.

I mean, we can argue about the amount of information, but the basics are all right there for you, in very obvious places, no?

Incidentally, a new (and better) website is in the works.

I imagine lots of complaints are either outdated, or by people who are used to different CAD systems and expect them to work exactly the same.

I've tried and worked with Catia, solidworks, and fusion 360, and I can easily complain about each of those for being confusing.