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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

  > Anyone looking to learn CAD probably ought to just jump
  > right to solidworks as a vendor that is at the very least
  > more predictable and has better return on your time.

I want to teach my daughters the principles of CAD, just as they've learned the principles of auto repair, Python, camping, and a host of other things. How am I going to run Solidworks on our Ubuntu home computers? How many hundreds of dollars does it cost?

I was looking to Autodesk Fusion 360 and even opened a team for our family recently. I decided on that after looking at FreeCAD, Solvespace, OpenSCAD, LibreCAD, and a few others, each of which had a fundamental dealbreaker. Perhaps it will have to be FreeCAD after all.

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> How am I going to run Solidworks on our Ubuntu home computers? How many hundreds of dollars does it cost?

I was looking at Solidworks back in 2015 and got a call back from sales. I heard: "For a personal license, the first year will be $39.95 and if you want support and upgrades with that, it's an additional $12.95 per year."

That sounded incredibly reasonable to me, much cheaper than I'd expected, and I was ready to buy until she continued, "so it'll be a little over 5 grand for the first year's license and support". ($39.95 and $3995 are commonly pronounced exactly the same.)

> $39.95 and $3995 are commonly pronounced exactly the same

To non-English speakers, it is common to read "$3995" as "thirty-nine ninety-five". It is very rare to say "three thousand and nine hundred and ninety-five dollars".

Usually one understands from context. "I paid just over fifteen for a used car", I would assume thousand... ...but it could be car collectors talking about spending 15 million.

>How many hundreds of dollars does it cost?

Sadly, you're missing a zero.

Out of the whole bunch, FreeCAD is probably the best open source solution.

If you don't mind pending a bit of $, and need something parametric, then Alibre CAD ticks a lot of the same boxes as F360. Windows only though.

If OTOH you don't need parametric design, I've gotten pretty far with Rhino3D, although again that is Windows/Mac only.

Rhino also has Grasshopper for parametric/programmable design. The visual code aspect can be a little tedious though.

In my opinion, out of all of the CAD you listed, Solvespace is by far the best to teach someone starting out. The interface is not absolutely overwhelming unlike every other option, it is super fast and lightweight so you don't get frustrated, unlike every other option, and it is pretty amazingly reliable.

It is definitely limited in the complexity of items you can make with it, but it is amazing for learning mechanical CAD.

As someone working on Solvespace, what was the dealbreaker for you? I know it has shortcomings and different people would give different answers to this question.

Actually, what are your deal breakers for each of the programs you listed?

This issue with Fusion seems like it might be a good opportunity for Solvespace to get more attention. I know I've looked at Solvespace in the past, but it has always seemed stagnant, what with the website saying the last release was in 2016. Since it seems like it is still under development, it might be a good time to do a v2.3.1 release and update the downloads page, along with a note that v3.0 is "coming soon".

The intent is to get a 3.0 out soon (by the end of summer already passed). It will not have the major rework that was originally planned for 3.0 but it is quite a bit better than 2.3.

Actually, I liked SolveSpace so much that I tried to open a Reddit sub for it. You're invited to join!

https://www.reddit.com/r/SolveSpace

I got stuck trying to create a bracket, very similar to the bracket tutorial. I was unable to properly set the location of two of the holes symmetrically. It was just an exercise to learn the app, if you're really interested in helping I can try to reproduce it and see exactly what the issue was.

I'm certain that the problem was with my own understanding of SolveSpace constraints, not with SolveSpace itself. At the time I was deciding which CAD application to marry, not trying to solve a specific issue for which I had a need.

We have our older students at dexter.school use Onshape. It's a good web-based analog to Solidworks: https://www.onshape.com/

For standard users (eg non-educational), it seems to be priced US$1,500/year for the cheapest version:

https://www.onshape.com/pricing

FreeCAD is amazing, I just migrated to Fusion 360 for ease of use but I will have to go back I guess.

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