FreeCAD 0.19

Now it's great, but if you're going to copy features like this, please make sure to document them so that people trying to learn how to use your tool without the requisite historical perspective don't get frustrated.

Eventually computing is going to get to the point where it's no longer possible to learn all of the historical baggage around why things are done a certain way. For a lot of people, we're already there.

My must-have is the workspace selector one that makes them buttons instead of that drop-down.

I personally prefer Fusion 360 (it feels sleeker and is way more usable with a touchpad), but it's definitely a viable choice.

It's ugly, it occasionally breaks your models, and it's capable of doing anything you could possibly want it to. It's like Gimp (before the new UI) vs. Photoshop.

There are lots of tutorials, but the quality is all over the place, and a lot of the wiki articles are out of date. The best way to learn FreeCAD (in my opinion) is to find something you want to accomplish (fix that broken part in the dishwasher) and experiment until you get the hang of it.

Here's a tube, which we can think about like the difference of two cylinders.

Writing and refactoring into modules (functions) is very natural and allowed me to get more perspective about the relationships of my models

    module Tube(height, width, thickness) {
      difference() {
        cylinder(h=height, r=width);
        cylinder(h=height,r=width-thickness);
      };
    };

I feel like it's not as far along as say KiCad or Blender as far as "competitive with commercial offerings" open source tooling goes, but development is very active and it seems to be improving at an impressive rate.

If you want to do simple CAD e.g. for 3D printing and you must use FOSS then I would recommend SolveSpace instead. It has some awkward flaws (most notably there's no bevel/chamfer feature) but aside from that it is much much better and easier to use than FreeCAD.

If you don't want to punish yourself by using FOSS then I would either way use Fusion360 and put up with their recently gimping of the free version, or simply pirate Solidworks. It's still by far the easiest CAD software to use, though the latest versions are getting kind of bloated.

FOSS CAD is not in a good shape yet.

Off topic, but until recently I would have said the same for EDA. Kicad may be powerful but it was also apparently designed by a UX sadist. Even if you are really familiar with other EDA tools it still makes approximately zero sense and has loads of weird "features" (like if you drag a component in the schematic it doesn't bring it's wires with it!) Eagle and gEDA are even worse.

Fortunately there's at least one decent FOSS EDA program now: Horizon EDA. There's also LibrePCB which I haven't tried, but Horizon is good and pretty easy to use (it has a rather confusing and over-complicated component/gate system but you can mostly ignore that).

I'm a PHB! When I'm not doing PHB things, I indulge my guilty pleasures.

OpenSCAD is pretty much tamed by me now. I'm not an expert by any means but I can design and print a mount for my Doorbird to toe it in towards the ringer. I use FreeCAD with my browser open to look up what to do. It is rather good and keeps on improving. I'm aware of Blender but it scares me. LibreCAD is available. I use SweetHome3D for home/office related stuff.

We have a decent pool of open source tools for CAD. FreeCAD is extremely capable already and keeps on getting better. I used to run it on Gentoo a few years back and simply getting it to compile was a pain. It is rapidly improving but do make sure you keep incremental backups for important work.

Have a look at this lot for some idea of what is on offer: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials Those are quite old and there is a lot more on offer.

But then so is Autocad's

TBH, neither are real 3D modeling softwares.

In both packages, you have do all your thinking in 2D, which is ideal if you did learn to design parts back in the 20th century with paper and pen, and an absolute torture if you did with real 3D software in the modern computer era.

For example, building a real 3D curve, i.e. something that has actual 3D curvature and no simple plane projection is simply a nightmare.

MagicaVoxel is a much simpler tool that’s more like working on a sandcastle & can be 3D printed.

Blender is probably better for animation / games.

For home additions, Trimble SketchUp is more productive because there is a large library of building components pre-modeled (like doors or standard pieces of wood that can be purchased at Home Depot).

For PCB layout, there are other specialized EDA tools references in other comments.

https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/12/understanding-the-inn...

That is, some people have different needs, and so dismissing FreeCAD because it doesn't yet fulfill your needs is a mistake.