I tried FreeCAD last week, and it was absolute trash. Extruding individual curves from a sketch as surfaces? Nah. Extruding multiple bodies from one sketch? Yes, but you can’t select them individually for subsequent operations. Are there synchronous modeling tools? I couldn’t find any. Rotation is terrible no matter which option I tried. If only I could get my SpacePilot Pro working with it. Can you even do any advanced surfacing? I could go on and on.
I was hoping for something akin to SolidWorks, which is kind of a second-teir modeling software in my eyes, but it was just a little better than AutoCAD. Maybe I’m just spoiled with NX. I just found it completely unusable.
FreeCAD has a… different workflow… than other CAD’s. It’s confusing at first, but once learned, it’s pretty easy to use.
I have used FreeCAD in place of Fusion360 for school and I found it better. Of course, not everyone will have basic operations and a different tool has a new learning curve.
Keep in mind that FreeCAD is also in development. No company (that I know) backs the development, making an open-source versatile CAD software takes a lot of time and has a lot of bugs/limitations.
I know I shouldn’t say this, but hopefully all tools (even non-free) will be available under Linux.
I try it every couple of months, but as long as it’s faster to boot into a Windows install and start Fusion360 than it is to learn how to make a cube in FreeCAD, I’m going to keep my windows install
There’s FreeCAD.
I tried FreeCAD last week, and it was absolute trash. Extruding individual curves from a sketch as surfaces? Nah. Extruding multiple bodies from one sketch? Yes, but you can’t select them individually for subsequent operations. Are there synchronous modeling tools? I couldn’t find any. Rotation is terrible no matter which option I tried. If only I could get my SpacePilot Pro working with it. Can you even do any advanced surfacing? I could go on and on.
I was hoping for something akin to SolidWorks, which is kind of a second-teir modeling software in my eyes, but it was just a little better than AutoCAD. Maybe I’m just spoiled with NX. I just found it completely unusable.
FreeCAD has a… different workflow… than other CAD’s. It’s confusing at first, but once learned, it’s pretty easy to use.
I have used FreeCAD in place of Fusion360 for school and I found it better. Of course, not everyone will have basic operations and a different tool has a new learning curve.
Keep in mind that FreeCAD is also in development. No company (that I know) backs the development, making an open-source versatile CAD software takes a lot of time and has a lot of bugs/limitations.
I know I shouldn’t say this, but hopefully all tools (even non-free) will be available under Linux.
I try it every couple of months, but as long as it’s faster to boot into a Windows install and start Fusion360 than it is to learn how to make a cube in FreeCAD, I’m going to keep my windows install
FreeCAD isn’t that hard to use. Just different and not as polished.