@Geit, we’ve had this discussion a number of times. I respect your view but, as I stated above, I look at it from a different perspective. Using F360, I have the advantages of a more sophisticated program. If, at some point, the free version of F360 is no more, or perhaps FreeCAD gains some killer feature(s) that make it even better than F360, then I will make the switch. I will not have to get frustrated by missing features, or ones that don’t work properly, and I will have the advantage that I will be able to re-learn FreeCAD more easily because I will know what features to look for, because I already found & used them in F360. They most likely will work somewhat differently, or be called something else, but they will accomplish the same things. Knowing that the program really must have such & such a feature is half the battle.
I really do respect & admire the work of the people who develop FreeCAD. It’s a monumental task. That said, I do not need to keep in mind that they are so few, and work with relatively few resources, when deciding which program to use. I can, and do, simply compare the 2 programs & pick the 1 that suits me the best. IOW, I compare the programs without any consideration for how they were developed. I just compare them head to head for what they do, and how they do it.
I just said how I see it. I am not a fanboy for sure. On the IRC chat I am often so critical that people ask me why I don’t use some other CAD software, when I hate FreeCAD so much, even tho I just wrote down all issues I found when designing one model as they happened.
FreeCAD could be so much more right now, but instead of investing time in the core elements and fixing bugs every one finds in the first five minutes of using, makes it hard and look bad. You can not make a first impression twice and the FreeCAD guys create bad impressions every day for people willing to swap. But hey, you can do water simulations and test boats, but the core, which lets you design boats and should be perfect first, suffers.
I understand why people see FreeCAD as a bad software compared to other CAD solutions. Because it is. The painful part is that it would only take a few hours to sort out simple UI flaws and a few weeks of intensive work to fix the TNP issues to make FreeCAD so much better compared to its current state.
FreeCAD simply lacks a person, which directs the development based on the urgent problems. RealThunder is doing a great job in fixing and enhancing parts, but he is just one person and many of his fixes are still not in the main development path.
It sounds like issues I used to have with UNIX/Linux developers. We used to call them UNIX Weenies. They never wanted to finish a program. They would get the basic functionality done & then want to move on to something they considered more interesting. I would argue that the program wasn’t at the point where the end user would find it easy & intuitive, and that that was the real goal. They would argue that it was boring & tedious & end users were a PITA. I would argue that end users were the only reason they had a job. They couldn’t get away with telling me, like they did with others, that something the end user wanted wasn’t technically feasible, because I knew as much or more about UNIX as they did, so I knew exactly what was & wasn’t feasible. Your description about FreeCAD development sounds like a number of the developers just can’t be bothered with sweating the little details (although I would argue that topology naming isn’t really a little detail – to me, like you said, it’s a core function that really has to work properly).
I don’t know leocad but, IMHO openSCAD is not an option. As a programmer, I tried it. The problem is filleting. OpenSCAD doesn’t do it well. For me, that’s a deal breaker. Filleting is not only a must-have, it’s close to the top of the list.
I am a new user of this forum (German - so pls bear with me and my GEnglish) and also somewhat brand new to FreeCAD. Had some starts with FC over the past 10 years but we never made really friends, due to a lot of stepping stones in the way to get something as end product which was close to my initial ideas …
I do have some CAD & EDA experience in the fields of woodworking (VCarve Pro) and PCB Design (KiCAD and EasyEDA) and recently a little bit with TinkerCAD, but FC’s learning curve was a bit too steep for me at that time when my job left me only few spare time for my diverse hobbies.
Now, a few years later, being retired and having a bit more time - and having completely switched to Macs and OS X (BigSur 11.6), I decided to start the FC adventure again as TinkerCAD is ok for starting up, but going for more complex things parametric apps seem to be more appropriate.
Having seen Irv’s latest YouTube videos on FreeCad I installed FC 0.92 (almost) successfully on my Mac (using the official .dmg file). I could also create my first little card box (following his example step by step) - ok, fine.
There were some glitches (model jumped somehow and sometimes on the screen …, which after a second attempt to create the model again just by heart didn’t come up again …
I tried to follow Irv’s advice to adjust my preferences such that my work benches looked 1:1 compared to his screen(s) - so easier to follow the first instruction steps.
But - I still have one confusing issue with that: my start screen is just empty - no examples, no news etc. No matter what options in the preferences I select or deselect - no content on the startup screen. Googled and duckduckgoed around - but could not find anything to fill my startup screen. I even couldn’t find the right location in the OS where FC might have hidden those files which it should show in the start screen.
Any ideas what I do wrong? Thanks in advance.
Raimund