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Comment by Always42 | Hacker News Reader

I really really really tried to switch to freecad when I switched to macos maybe 8 months ago. But I couldn't stick with it. The program is just so far from solidworks for me that I cannot justify the time and frustration... The interface feels like an ee wrote it ( I am an Ee) and honestly it's buggy. I found myself restarting the program alot to get out of certain states. I wanted to like it... Mcad is the only thing I really want on my Mac I don't have a solution for.

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Look at MangoJelly's beginner's tutorial playlist, start on first video and follow along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXN7TOg3kj4&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...

There are definitely problems with FC (but then even expensive CADs have problems). One of the biggest problem I think was lack of good learning material. MangoJelly does an excellent work on that.

It has some issues, but I did go all in recently to prepare the drawings for a planning permission and eventually I got used to it. I was trained on Autocad, Archicad, some 3dsmax in the day. I think it is unfair to compare it to Solidworks and similar commercial software purely because of unmatched support you get out of those. Freecad is usable and not too bad IMO.

It’s worth giving the 0.22 weekly snapshots a try. The UI isn’t as refined as commercial offerings that can pay people to just do it, but the UX is much improved and quite usable. I tried to get going with FreeCAD a while back and gave up, but I’m pretty productive in it now for functional 3D prints.

Same. Make the interface exactly like Solidworks. Prioritise nothing else. And it might be a success. The interface and user experience is fricking weird. It's like Coder Art at the moment. But the frustrating thing is the core is in there somewhere beneath the stupid GUI.

Though I will say it can be good at converting file formats sometimes. I have had a few tricky STEP files that it managed to make usable.

Last comment I promise.. https://www.freecad.org/ shows two gears that can never work together in the real world. This shows that the devs are coders first and know very little about real world design. That or maybe the intern got told to update the homepage. So much potential with FreeCad but the devs seem not able to prioritise killing the overpriced commercial SW. There are millions of $ on the table if Freecad made commercial use was a priority. Maybe they just like coding and not making money.

It is an open source project. Mostly done by volunteers. Everyone with slightly different motivations. Up until now, very few have been paid anything at all to work on it. Some funding has become available recently, for some of the developers. But it will probably never make millions of dollars. And it will never kill all the commercial SW option out there. But it can cover a larger and larger amount of hobbyist and semi-pro usecases, and I expect this trend to continue.

You don't know who was in charge of the website. The gear you are complaining about is part of the FreeCAD logo and only has artistic value. You're complaining about someone's website and lack of CAD skills, not their ability to develop CAD software.

If these people like "coding", then you would expect them to work on things like previews or visual manipulators. Lots of things to "code".

It is already a success. Thousands of people are using it to make useful designs on a regular basis.

Same here. I really wish there was a fork that was willing to try a new interface. Unfortunately these type of projects have complex codebases and a lot of inertia so it's unlikely to happen.

There is a fork calls Onseel I believe, which has a slighty different UI. And it looks like many UI improvement are coming into mainline now / over the next releases.

Do you mean Ondsel?

Yes, that is the one!

2 minor ui features are in Ondsel & latest git that make a huge difference:

- auto-constraints. If you select a line and click "constrain", it automatically chooses a length constraint. If you select 2 lines, you get an angle constraint. A circle, a radius constraint.

- constraining on drawing. When you draw a rectangle, you can immediately type one dimension, press tab, type the other dimensions. You don't need to manually select constraints.

What is your experience level?

I made the change and I did a few decent sized projects and a major project. Obviously its no Catia/NX from a feature POV, but it can do everything I needed.

Just a casual industrial design list of things I could not do easily in FreeCAD:

- chamfer - easy wall thickness - draft angle - bosses - vents

Probably about 10 more of those operations that are easy in Fusion360 and very difficult in FreeCAD.

Great that it could do everything you needed but for many people the second you need to do adult things FreeCAD unfortunately falls apart.

Doesn't freecad do draft angles, bosses, wall thickness and vents pretty similarly to SolidWorks?

Chamfers are a weakness, but not entirely a lost cause.

I never had any issues with chamfer, wall thickness, or draft angle.

But I won't be like those linux users that pretend 'the problem doesnt exist'.

I just personally havent run into the issue. Curious, what is your experience level? I'm wondering if you are building a house of cards with CAD and not realizing it. Even solidworks will break if you do things in the wrong order.

Relative newbie. For reference, I started on openscad, pretty quickly realized that was insufficient, started learning FreeCAD before eventually arriving on fusion360. I found Fusion360 much easier to use than FreeCAD

The use case was designing injection molds for electronics enclosures. Something I would say requires subtle and precise nuances at low tolerances but not remotely a jet engine level of complex design at all.

I don’t doubt I was probably doing things “the wrong way” in FreeCAD. But it was very difficult to figure out the right way in FreeCAD oftentimes.

The Part Design wall thickness tool works but is not good.

But in 0.22-dev there is a good sketch offset/sketch frame tool that would let you make an outline wall in 2D that you can then pocket.

Another approach is to make a SubshapeBinder of a face, offset that and pocket it directly.

Fillets and chamfers work but they have OCC bugs and limitations; there are ways to work around them but whereas in Fusion360 you might place geometry on a chamfer, with anything built around OCC it is better to treat chamfers and fillets as “dress-up” only, and do them last. Anything structural is definitely better done in a sketch or with a subtractive sweep on an edge.

Bosses: you can taper pads/extrudes easily enough, and there are some tricks involving copying external geometry of sketches and face/shape binders that can help you match them up across bodies.

None of this is to suggest that FreeCAD is easier than Fusion360. It’s not, and it’s definitely something of a lifestyle choice. (You won’t hear me telling you that you should use GIMP over Photoshop, though).

But it also doesn’t have Fusion360’s limitations: ten or five projects or whatever at a time, reapplying for the license every year, STEP support that could get taken away from you again when Autodesk decides to reassess the free tier, etc.; and I can share FreeCAD as easily as I can share my designs.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Fusion360 is bad or Autodesk is a particularly unusually bad actor. I just don’t want to be dependent on the whims of closed source free tiers in cloud software until I absolutely have to be.

So far, my limitations in CAD have nothing to do with FreeCAD, and my 3D printer isn’t the slowest part of the puzzle. In both cases the issue is me.

The problem of the “right way” is definitely FreeCAD’s primary issue; it’s not as easy to mix the guided flow of Part Design with the more generalised tools in the other workbenches as it should be. (Sketches on curved surfaces are a classic example of this.)

But there is an increasingly broad range of tutorial materials out there now, and the major changes around Ondsel and FreeCAD 1.0 will only improve things.

Totally get not wanting to depend on a closed source cloud provider. Glad to see FreeCAD is becoming easier to use but you did point out its most fatal flaw imo: the kernel that drives the geometry is just kinda broken right now and is buggy and crashes a lot. Good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24514191

It will always be somewhat broken; bRep has its limits, and OCC certainly does. But it’s enormously capable and open source, and all we have.

The crashes, by and large, are freecad/qt rather than OCC.

FreeCAD 0.20.2 almost never crashes; I had maybe three in eight weeks of daily struggles with a complex design problem.

Totally get that - one does not simply just wake up one day and casually write a robust, feature complete geometry kernel by themselves, as alluded to in the above linked thread. It is a massive undertaking that requires a team of very smart people and probably years of work. I do wish there was some consortium pushing for a next-gen replacement of OCC though, I would absolutely donate towards that cause. I can't claim to know whether OCC is salvageable to the point that it is possible for it to become as good as some of the closed source ones, but other, more well versed people in the space seem to indicate that it has some pretty fundamental problems with it that are not easily addressed.

There is a Chinese fork of OCC -- I'm away from the computer where it is bookmarked but I think it's called OpenGeometry? No idea if they are really making headway.

Did you try the 'part design' workbench?

check out solvespace if you havent already

I hope it changes, but my experience mirrors yours. HN loves to promote FreeCAD but when you actually sit down and use the software the comparison is laughable.

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