this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Sadly, I couldn't fine even one that was at least usable in my experience.
I model a lot for 3D-printing, and of course tried FreeCAD.
It had a very steep learning curve and is very unique in its workflow, compared to other CADs.
I somehow got the hang of it, but it still was very much not usable.
It crashed every 5 minutes, the UI is very convoluted, and even the simplest tasks take half an hour, compared to the 2 minutes it takes on other software.
Since Fusion360 doesn't work on Linux, there's pretty much only Onshape.
Apart from being a SaaS-product ("cloud based"), and therefore out of your control, which I strongly dislike, it's absolutely great UX wise.
But good news, there are people working on a solution. I will add the name of the project later if I can remember it again.
Edit: found it: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d
There are also people forking the engine and some core features of FreeCAD and want to turn it into something better, but I don't know if they've made something out of that idea yet.
I personally never had a problem with Free cad. It's the only cad software I ever used, so I can't compare it to others but it just worked after I learned some basics.
FreeCAD requires a lot more clicks. Simple example: You want to extrude part of a sketch. In Fusion360 you select the part, hit extrude, done. In FreeCAD you can't extrude a part of a sketch, only whole sketches, so you have to make a new sketch, important the geometry of your previous sketch, repaint over the imported geometry to make it an actually sketch and now you are allowed to extrude it. When you have an extrusion that would result in multiple bodies, you have to redo this produce for each and every body, since FreeCAD extrusions are only allowed to produce one body. This can easily turn a 5sec operation into a 10min operation.
On top of that you have the topological naming problem that forces you do basically remoddel your whole thing from scratch if you want to change anything in the early build steps.
There are numerous ways to ease the pain (MasterSketch, Datum planes, ShapeBinder), but they all require a lot of discipline and planing ahead. You can't just YOLO your models in FreeCAD the way you can in Fusion360.
On the plus side, the discipline FreeCAD forces on you can result in cleaner results. In Fusion360 it's quite easy to model yourself in a corner were everything is underconstrained and will just exploded if you touch anything. Fusion360 will let you get away with a lot until it is to late. FreeCAD will go "I can't do that, Dave" a lot sooner and force you to clean up.
All that complaining aside, FreeCAD is my CAD tool of choice. I am never going to touch Fusion360 with its ever more restrictive licensing scheme ever again.
If you've used any mainstream CAD software like Inventor, NX, or Solidworks then FreeCAD is extremely clunky in comparison.
Remember faster!
Please 💖
I did. https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d
Uh, that looks promising! Thank you!
Im definitely interested as well, we got plasticity I suppose, but that doesn't have a timeline and is missing a lot of more advanced features
I added the link into my original comment for you :)
Thanks! That's awesome, I'll check it out. Hopefully it will one day be able to match more professional software in terms of functionality and stability
What linux were you using if you don't mind asking?
@Guenther_Amanita @jackpot
Nobara has a pile of graphics optimizations, as well as OS fixes for programs like Blender and daVinci Resolve. It should work well for other CAD programs.
At this time Fedora. I used both the Flatpak and native package, but both were very prone to crashes.
I used it for some time too on Windows, same problem. It isn't a Linux issue, it's a FreeCAD issue. It's too convoluted and bloated, while probably not having enough maintainers.
You should try arch or an arch fork, arch doesn't leave broken upstream pkgs unpatched too long, either they work or they are out
@Guenther_Amanita
I am already.
While I don't plan to use FreeCAD in the near future, I already use Arch in Distrobox on Fedora Atomic. I quite like it, but still mostly refer to Flatpaks first when possible, since they have a lot of users and are better sandboxed.