Just dual boot…
Man, we as a community really ought to put more effort and resources helping out FreeCAD.
For me it’s all about learning freecad so I can look down upon the cloud cad peasants 😹
For real though I completely agree. Freecad is just a plugin away from having a more accessible UI.
the ui is actually pretty good when you get used to it imo, it’s just that it’s very busy and intimidating for beginners
I think there should just be a simple builtin tutorial that beginners can access, that guides them through making a cylinder or something to assure them that freecad isn’t as intimidating as it looks
I’m a mechanical engineer and have spent literal years in front of Creo and SolidWorks. Trying to use FreeCAD felt like flying a Cessna 172 after being accustomed to a business jet; they can ostensibly get you where you need to go, but the cost in effort to use the tool is not worth the cost saved in buying the commercial tool.
FreeCAD’s UI is good enough to work, but not to everyone’s taste. Personally, I detest the clown car UI of Fusion and it’s lack of customization for my work flow - custom pie menus rock. Something that FreeCAD allows the user to do. Not to mention the half-assed mix of local install/cloud that is Fusion360. It locks your projects in the cloud subject to AutoDesk’s whims, but eats your local storage. At least OnShape and TinkerCAD is all cloud and honest about it. But it’s all pay to play if you want access to the good stuff.
They are improving the FreeCAD UI slowly. The Ondsel version, (based on the 0.22 Dev release), gets high marks from a lot of users about the UI design. Not my personal cup 'o tea, but I do see the allure for many users. Besides, if you don’t like how it works, you can easily customize things to your personal tastes.
They are really putting in the work to make FreeCAD not suck. I was a SolidWorks pro and still found FreeCAD quite unintuitive to use. Ondsel has fixed a lot of those issues… looking at you dimensioning tool. It also “just works” on Linux which is really nice (a friend tried on windows and not so much lol)
They’re both really good (considerably better at what they do than FreeCAD is, to be honest), but they don’t do what FreeCAD does. Blender is for art, so that’s a different thing entirely. OpenSCAD does mechanical part design, but it only does mechanical part design. FreeCAD can do architectural CAD, BIM (Building Information Modeling), civil engineering stuff (e.g. working with survey data/site elevation), FEA (Finite Element Analysis), 2D drafting, stuff with NURBS and point clouds, texturing/lighting/rendering, CAM and CNC (i.e. toolpaths for a mill or 3D printer), etc.
I have actual designed 3d print stuff in Blender and it turned out fine. There are people out there who only use Blender for 3d modeling and there are even plug ins that allow better functionality. Though, I’ve been trying to transition to Freecad since it’s much more cad focused.
First person to come up with a time machine, can you make your first trip back to the early 80s and buy 86-DOS and open source it before Bill gets his grubby hands on it?
Plot twist, you have to partner with Richard Stallman for the first open source licensing to get off the ground and end up with GNU plus BSD and its all powershell commands.
On a more serious note as a windows user it just does a good enough job that I don’t want to put in any effort for something better.
I dream of a world where I don’t have to dual boot.
Due to planned virtualisation in Windows this will probably soon be the case for people who Dual boot due to anticheat.
Due to planned virtualisation in Windows
I must have missed something. What are you referencing with this comment?
They want to prevent spooky programs running in the kernel (like crowdstrike) which may break the whole system. Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/26/24206719/microsoft-windows-changes-crowdstrike-kernel-driver
Out of curiosity what do you dual boot for? I used to dual boot for gaming but I’ve lately found that proton works very well with my games and there is no need to run Windows for anything
Yeah proton works really well for me for the vast majority of my games but there are a few that don’t. I dual boot solely to play those.
- Star Citizen - much worse performance for me using Linux.
- Cyberpunk - Used to work fine but started crashing on Linux for me
- Counter Strike 2 - Audio cuts out after about 15 - 20 minutes on Linux.
- Supreme Commander - Frequent crashes on Linux.
I think people can run most of those fine but I haven’t had luck and don’t spend much time tinkering.
There are plenty of games that runs on linux just fine
https://libregaming.org/play-libre-games/
The games you mentioned don’t seem to have anything so special that they are worth trading for your privacy and freedom over.
Just built my first fully dedicated Linux machine. Still keeping my old Windows desktop around purely because I play League of Legends and they use a kernel level anticheat, so it won’t run on VM.
Fun fact, ever since Riot made it mandatory to install their rootkit if you want to play their games, every time I try to eject a flash drive, it says it can’t eject because it’s in use - even if I just plugged it in. And that’s super comforting.
It’s not like Riot Games is fully owned by Tencent or anything…
But if you still want to play the game, having a computer that you only use for league, with nothing else installed, is the best way to go about it
They rootkit your personal device but everything in the name of addictive entertainment.
Fair, addictive entertainment, Vanguard was the only anticheat that was able to ban people using dedicated hacking cards on their PCIe slot. I know it’s scary to have something like that on kernel level, but we only reached this place because cheaters are fine letting random hackers run kernel level cheats on their devices just to win.
