With credit to xkcd for the original "Dependency" cartoon FOSDEM is an organisational masterpiece. The infrastructure and logistics of thousands of opensource people amassing around 59 stands and 9…
It’s honestly probably in the good enough territory at this point for makers. I think I finally realised how freecad wants me to use it and found it much nicer to work with after that, and I think I found a camera control I can live with coming from primarily solidworks.
Definitely using more and more, for 70 cad/year I’ll keep my solidworks maker sub for anything I find I can’t do in freecad but I’m really going to try committing to using it this year as my primary cad package. There’s still some quirks but I’m also way more willing to live with that with foss
I finally realised how freecad wants me to use it and found it much nicer to work with after that
Exactly this - once people invest the time to understand the FreeCAD flow, and get over it, they’ll find it’s an amazing and extremely productive tool.
I tried out SolidWorks and it’s a complete mess. You can’t just download and install it, it runs a bunch of weird background programs on the computer, and interacting with the multiple web sites is a nightmare. I’ve been waiting well over a month for them to refund under the promised 30 day guarantee. I’d never, ever do anything with that awful company again.
I’m really looking forward to see how Ondsel does. I’ve been using it for the last week or two, as it’s integrated 0.22 features, and I think it could be a really good thing for the FreeCAD community.
Oh yeah solidworks connected is a right pain, I use it purely because of my experience with solidworks itself, familiarity goes a long way especially when it’s been a while. Ondsel is what I’ve been using, grabbed it on a whim after it was recommended a few weeks ago. The fact it’s done by a bunch of freecad contributors is interesting to me, and not that I need then but the collab tools look interesting.
Wrt to the workflow it’s funny because it’s the way I wanted to use it, it totally behaves like other cad packages. I’m definitely sketch first for everything, I just was using the part workbench instead of the PartDesign workbench. I actually really like how freecad handles variables through the spreadsheet, put together the start of some parametric gears for a project idea I have.
It’s honestly probably in the good enough territory at this point for makers. I think I finally realised how freecad wants me to use it and found it much nicer to work with after that, and I think I found a camera control I can live with coming from primarily solidworks.
Definitely using more and more, for 70 cad/year I’ll keep my solidworks maker sub for anything I find I can’t do in freecad but I’m really going to try committing to using it this year as my primary cad package. There’s still some quirks but I’m also way more willing to live with that with foss
Exactly this - once people invest the time to understand the FreeCAD flow, and get over it, they’ll find it’s an amazing and extremely productive tool.
I tried out SolidWorks and it’s a complete mess. You can’t just download and install it, it runs a bunch of weird background programs on the computer, and interacting with the multiple web sites is a nightmare. I’ve been waiting well over a month for them to refund under the promised 30 day guarantee. I’d never, ever do anything with that awful company again.
I’m really looking forward to see how Ondsel does. I’ve been using it for the last week or two, as it’s integrated 0.22 features, and I think it could be a really good thing for the FreeCAD community.
Oh yeah solidworks connected is a right pain, I use it purely because of my experience with solidworks itself, familiarity goes a long way especially when it’s been a while. Ondsel is what I’ve been using, grabbed it on a whim after it was recommended a few weeks ago. The fact it’s done by a bunch of freecad contributors is interesting to me, and not that I need then but the collab tools look interesting.
Wrt to the workflow it’s funny because it’s the way I wanted to use it, it totally behaves like other cad packages. I’m definitely sketch first for everything, I just was using the part workbench instead of the PartDesign workbench. I actually really like how freecad handles variables through the spreadsheet, put together the start of some parametric gears for a project idea I have.