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.
I think PS is a lot more intuitive than GIMP, as someone who also has used Linux and GIMP from a young age (though dual booting windows for most of my childhood, for pirated PS as one of the main reasons). I would love it if GIMP could get to PS’s level but tbh I don’t think they ever will just due to lacking the resources Adobe has. I don’t use PS anymore as I avoid proprietary software whenever at all possible (and I no longer have any windows machines and pirated PS is iffy on wine last time I tried) so I’m going to continue with GIMP, but yeah I still don’t think it holds a candle to the power and ease of use of PS unfortunately.
It really depends on your needs. 3D printing community is very satisfied with FreeCAD, and GIMP is great for my needs when I need to find a way to increase visibility of some features in drone images and than make python script to repet it hundreds of times. No way I could do it in in PS. Making it run under wine already takes too much time.
And it is not only about money for license but about freedom.
I always see coments like this, and while I appreciate sharing of experience it is just being boring. At least add something specific and don’t be a bot.
It’s not even remotely an alternative to Photoshop for various reasons. Maaaaybe for personal use I could agree to some degree.
What is wrong with an existing FreeCAD? It seemed to me that the project is very active
It’ll catch on at some point. KiCAD did. Blender did. Many other FOSS apps have!
FreeCAD has already merged the solution for the infamous ‘topological naming problem’. The 1.0 release may happen soon!
It needs to be faster and more stable. Crashes and slowness are killer issues. Slowness is single core issue. You can see one core working it’s ass off, but the other like 15, sitting doing nothing. Plus it freezes during that often because it’s not async/multi-threaded enough. Crashes, well that’s just bad, but in this case it’s normally when even 48GB RAM isn’t enough. Bloody curved geometry from external sources with massive messes. Needs more exchanging files methods that isn’t mesh based. But also mesh rationalization tools are need too.
Nothing, just some users with sore butts because they’re trained on AutoCAD. We need more Unis to train students with FreeCAD, and this issue will go away.
It sounds like the Swiss government is forcing all State funded engineers to use FOSS, so in curious if that means they’ll all switch to FreeCAD
It is OK, it is just doesn’t do what a highly established pro CAD tool does. if you are used to the pro tools you recognize what is missing and it makes the workflow frustrating and tedious. You can still accomplish your goal in freeCAD, just takes longer and changes don’t auto cascade through to your GCode, etc
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.
freecad is like gimp. devs with godcomplex ruin it for the rest of the world. i’d rather use krita, blender etc.
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.
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
