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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

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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.

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