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Comment by starky | Hacker News Reader

Solidworks perpetual licensing has always had an annual maintenance fee associated with it, but they changed it a couple years ago where if you let your maintenance subscription lapse they charge you for the years you missed plus an additional fee. They also increased their maintenance prices by like 30% last year.

So we are now in the process of switching to Creo which, while being a user experience nightmare, is so much more stable and runs faster than Solidworks.

Agreed about FreeCAD, the user interface is terrible and even though Ondsel exists I just can't stand the way the program works. As much as I want to use FOSS software there really isn't much that beats the commercial products if you have access to them.

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> ... about FreeCAD, the user interface is terrible and even though Ondsel exists I just can't stand the way the program works.

FreeCAD seems to operate in the same way as Catia (ie v5/v6), or at least have been developed to follow the same approach to things.

Saying that as I used to use Catia years ago, so the FreeCAD approach wasn't completely foreign.

It's beyond that though. How many different, incompatible, assembly bench plugins are there these days?

Ondsel helps a lot with that. FreeCAD 1.0 I think also now has a default Assembly bench.

Yeah, the different, incompatible assembly plugins is why I stopped using FreeCAD a few years ago.

That's reportedly been fixed (guess they picked a winner?), but I haven't taken a look since. I probably will, at some point, but I generally have a different focus these days.

They didn't pick a winner. They (Ondsel and others) evaluated all the workbenches, chose the best ideas and built a new workbench around a new (well, new to C++) solver.

There was an Ondsel blog post about this:

https://ondsel.com/blog/default-assembly-workbench-7/

Thanks, that's good info. It sounds like a really optimal outcome. :)

It is. The chap they hired to do port his solver has done really great motion solving work in the past (and, amusingly, had an application called "FreeCAD" before FreeCAD existed).

http://www.ar-cad.com

It's very positive that he's working for Ondsel.

You just reminded me that I had tried Catia once before and that it also completely flummoxed me in how unobvious its approach was.

Now why would anyone choose that program as the one to base theirs off of, it isn't like Pro/E and SolidWorks weren't around in 2002 when they started FreeCAD.

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