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Comment by jc4p | Hacker News Reader

Autodesk bought EAGLE in 2016, so just about ten years between acquisition and discontinuation.

EAGLE is the first PCB design app I learned (and had a harder onramp than React) so this is sad, but it is important to note that most hobbyists have already switched over to KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/

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Even professionally, some of the places I worked for lately preferred KiCAD because you can check in libraries and projects to git and see meaningful diffs.

Altium sure does leave a lot to be desired in that respect with its large binary files.

And many other areas. I really enjoyed how they removed some features I used from their cloud offering and then made it a paid upgrade.

I am not sure if you realize that Eagle is fully embedded and rebranded within Fusion360 so you will have access to the same functionality but in integrated environment (for better or worse)

Yeah, I have no love for Autodesk as a begrudging Fusion360 user, but on the surface it seems that 10 years before sunsetting an acquired product as well as integrating it into an existing platform in that same timeframe is pretty good as far as a product acquisition goes from an end user perspective.

2016 was not 10y ago tho.

EOL is 2026, so ten years.

Yeah, on paper it looks an acceptable strategy. Unfortunately it looks like they botched execution.

Speaking as a subscriber to Fusion: Do-it-all software is nearly always inferior to special purpose software. I don't use the built-in Eagle functionality in Fusion even though I've paid for it.

Surprised it lasted that long. This reminds me of when they bought out Softimage in 2009 because XSI might have grown into something that challenges Maya, then released the last version in 2014 after delivering five years of barely any new features.

Let me guess, they gave it half-baked support for FBX files?

It's anecdotal, but I just recently started getting into more hardware-oriented stuff and found that KiCad came recommended for PCB design/etc. I found it to be pretty useful, but I'm too much of a novice to really give it a fair shake.

My advice to new kicad users is just to watch someone on YouTube go through a familiar project and see how their flow is, then try to create your own project from design to implementation. Next, check out the kicad library guidelines to see what it takes to create a library part so you can get everything right. Lastly, open up the shortcuts screen so you can see what key does what, you’ll get the most common ones quickly and the others you can see when you are going through menus.

Also used EAGLE first briefly for hobbyist work, right after it got acquired, but my team switched to Altium soon that seemed maybe too powerful for my sake. I used KiCad afterwards and it works on Mac like EAGLE did.

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