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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

There's also a long-standing branch by a major contributor (but with some kind of complicated politics that someone else can probably better explain) which has a non-zipped non-churny on-disk format specifically to allow using version control.

(I think it's called linkstage3, but it's been a long time, I keep trying and failing to get on with FreeCAD, always end up back using Fusion360. Not that that works well with git of course, I just can manage to actually design stuff.)

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I'm in the same boat, I always mean to switch to FreeCAD, I always fail and stay with OnShape because that's what I know, and I only use OnShape over Fusion because the former runs on Linux.

I'd like to switch 5 FreeCAD just because then I can save the files to my computer, but the UI is too different from Fusion/OnShape.

I've tried multiple times to get into freecad but the ux is just not for me. One time I also lost like 3 hours of work so I called it quits.

Now I usually use solvespace, though that only does 3D modeling, no CAM, ...

To be fair, SolveSpace is tiny, capable, and pretty nifty overall. Maybe I should spend another 30 minutes to learn it again, as I forgot everything I learned the first time around, years ago.

Solvespace can export g-code. It's in the file menu, export 2d section or something. Select file type g-code.

This is an area I'd like to improve a lot when I get back to working on it!

Ohh I didn't know that, thanks for letting me know. Although I won't use it because I do 3d printing and use prusa slicer.

I love solvespace. It's a wonderful program. But I don't think I've ever been able to make a complete model of something I needed without running into model breaking NURBs errors. Maybe there's a list of known gotchya's that most users know to avoid in their modeling, but for me it seems to break on very trivial things so I've never been able to use solvespace as a tool. Which is sad, because otherwise, I quite like it.

Have you tried zoo cad (formerly kittycad)?. It may be still too early but worth keeping your eye on.

https://zoo.dev/

No, but it looks interesting, thanks! Kind of like OpenSCAD with Copilot.

I love Siemens NX 10, personally. I can't get over how it could run in Windows Server on a potato over Terminal Services a decade ago; whereas Solid Edge, SolidWorks, and Autodesk all puked and blew chunks Siemens NX 10 hummed along like the Terminal Services environment was its home turf.

Maybe I should spin up a Windows qube, just for old time's sake...

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