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Comment by sen | Hacker News Reader

I spent a solid month trying to switch from Fusion 360 to FreeCAD (as a hobbyist maker) and while I got to the point where I could pretty much make anything I needed… it never stopped being a struggle, and taking twice as long.

I really really want an OSS alternative to Fusion/etc but FreeCAD needs a lot of work before it’ll even come close.

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I can't thinking that the struggles of an experienced Fusion 360 user such as yourself would be a very valuable thing to contribute to the FreeCAD project.

It's only a few years since we used to hear regular reports of people really struggling with the Blender UI too. It's great to see the improvements to Blender now paying off.

I think there's a fairly good chance that the devs aren't aware of all the rough edges or quirky choices in the same way that a power user of another CAD system would be.

(My own personal CAD experience is so dated at this point as to be pretty useless. I learnt on Unigraphics on a Sun workstation way back in the mists of time but have forget almost everything about it.)

Agreed, FreeCAD is painful to use when you’ve been spoiled by Fusion or OnShape. I’ve tried using SALOME as an OSS alternative, it’s somewhat reminiscent of FreeCAD but something of an improvement. CadQuery is another possibility, but I would miss some of the drawing tools - full parametric CAD seems too limiting.

FreeCAD's user experience is incoherent or perhaps more like chaotic for a newcomer - to FreeCAD, but experienced in CAD -. Like there was no coherent way of thinking or common approaches in it, like if hundreds of people added pieces to it here and there the way they pleased.

At least this is what I seen 5-7 years ago, gave up very quickly struggling with it - a software supposed to make things easier, not more complex, and FreeCAD made things unnecessarily difficult and complicated. Maybe I should look at it again now, hopefully things improved.

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