Issue stats: overall, there are 1852 open issues in the tracker, down by 14 from last week. 26 of them are v1.0 release blockers, down by 14 from last week as well.
holy crap! this is great news!
I really gotta work on learning the workflows. I am so used to Solidworks at this point I have a hard time thinking of a different way of doing things.
I have sort of soft-committed to Alibre, which is to say I actually paid for it, but an improving FreeCAD is good for everyone. If you haven’t tried it lately, give it a download. Grab a weekly build to see where they are with the latest, or if you want to see some real effort put into the UI (though I don’t think they have the toponaming integrated yet), grab the Ondsel soft-fork; use their Github so you don’t have to sign up.
For designing single parts for machining or 3D printing, it’s getting a lot better, with enough guidance that you could probably get the sketch started without revisiting tutorial vids, but, well, it’s still FreeCAD. There is less handholding, and once they’re complete features tend to live where they live. :-)
Also of note of course, if you want to try to make a few bucks from your designs, drawing or re-drawing in FreeCAD could save you a lot of hassle if something catches people’s fancy.