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Comment by donquichotte | Hacker News Reader

Very cool to see another contender in the open source 3D CAD space. I really want to like and use FreeCAD, but with Fusion360 (where my account has been banned because I accidentally once used it from my company's VPN to model something for private use) and Onshape I am just so much faster and tear out way less hair.

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Been there, done that. I also decided to move to FreeCAD and it was a real pain at first. But I got used to it surprisingly soon. I found two Youtube channels really useful:

- https://www.youtube.com/@OffsetCAD - a lot of practice exercises. Just watching these is already helpful, working together even more so. It helped to remove a lot of "how do I ...?" road blocks for me.

- https://www.youtube.com/@MangoJellySolutions is about stuff all over the FreeCAD - from beginners tutorials to really advanced deepdives.

I see Onshape has a free tier with some features missing (such as simulation). Also "all data is saved in a public workspace".

I am willing to pay for software but all CAD software seems to offer subscription only that is quite expensive (the Standard tier of Onshape is about 150 Euros a month). I'd love to have something like the former Sketchup and would pay 200 or even 300 Euro to "own" the software.

Something like doesn't seem to exist anymore and therefore I am biting the bullet and learn FreeCAD although I gave up on it at least once. The videos by "Adventures in creation" are quite good I think, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_lDwWaB4Jc

Problem with onshape is that most computation is done in the cloud and the free has been throttled a lot the last year or so imo, so you just constantly wait for sketches or extrusions to open or changes to apply. A minute or more sometimes.

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