Hacker News Reader

Comment by kuon | Hacker News Reader

While I am a big proponent of open source, a few are not good enough yet. The most important one being CAD. No CAD is good enough for serious mechanical engineering except commercial ones. The creative software (GIMP, inkscape) can replace Adobe but they are much harder yo use with worse integration between them. In the other direction, some OSS software are just way better than the commercial solution (I'd put OBS in those).

View on HN

My recent experience with OpenCASCADE is that since the new FUSE algorithm was introduced for Boolean operations with fuzzy values [0] the library itself is definitely up to par for professional use. (Although it’s unfortunate that many API entry points do not advertise their newer versions, and many developers end up using slower, legacy algorithms). Recent development trajectory on OpenCASCADE has been quite impressive.

What’s missing is a compelling user application now, and this is tarnished by the kernels existing reputation. Case in point, shapr (an iOS CAD modelling app) switched away from OpenCASCADE in 2017, before development trajectory really took off [1]

Also, when searching OpenCASCADE in Google, you get hacker news comments like this [2]

[0]https://dev.opencascade.org/content/fuzzy-boolean-operations [1] https://discourse.shapr3d.com/t/shapr3d-3-0-is-here-and-it-s... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536518

Good examples. OBS is definitely superior. As much as I would like open source creative software, I recommend the closed source Affinity Photo and Designer as Adobe alternatives. Very inexpensive and extremely simple to use.

Its seems in general anything Creative, FOSS struggles at.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com