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Is it any closer to functioning like Solidworks, NX, Creo, and all the other professional CAD software packages?

Edit: After opening it up it seems better than before but still not a replacement. I can use the draw tool to create a rectangle but than immediately cannot apply symmetry or equal length constraints until I delete others which shouldn't overlap. Clicking to create a cut or hole opens up a window that does not make it easy to create a new sketch from within or place something from within (but you can just make a sketch were you want something and then open them up and that they lock onto).

I've generally been a pretty harsh critic of FreeCAD because it represents the only entry in the market of linux CAD and it has frustrated me that it does not just do what is known to work. This seems usable. Still annoying, still not a replacement, but usable. So progress.

3 comments

My impression of FreeCAD as a project is that for much if its life it has suffered from a certain amount of developer churn and lack of focus. It's like somebody builds a workbench and gets it working just good enough using a workflow that makes sense to them, but then nobody ever really bothers to flesh out the rest of it, so if you try to do things in a different way that may be perfectly sensible to you the result is a broken mess. Eventually somebody decides they can do better, and maybe they do, but the replacement still has a lot of rough spots that never get finished and the cycle starts again.

It seems like the development team has gotten much more organized in the last couple years, so I have a lot of hope for the future. I think that good open source parametric CAD is something the world really needs.

I hope. I only use Windows at this point because of CAD and FEA software and it gets worse every version. For FEA there are options on Linux but for CAD you have been SOL since most major CAD suites dropped Linux support over a decade ago.

It's inherently limited by its geometry kernel. Most "real" CAD suites use something like parasolid, usually with a bunch of extras slapped on top. Making a new one from scratch is a massive undertaking, but I'll remain forever hopeful that we get a new, modern, open-source kernel one of these days...

This isn't really true. The vast majority of problems are in the UI. The geometry kernel is limited, but it's good enough for an open source project. Compared to say OpenSCAD, Open CASCADE is leagues ahead.

I don't necessarily agree in this case - OCCT is more than capable for what FreeCAD is offering. Add to that the development trajectory of OCCT also seems to be really taking off recently (with the 8.0-RC, they've re-worked how all B-Spline algorithms work, with implications for all operations).

Not gonna lie I just hope the rewrite it in rust community takes a stab at it at one point,

There are already at least two geometry kernels being written in scratch in Rust (see fornjot.app for one) --- the problem is the first parts are obvious/easy, so initial progress is rapid, then one hits the difficult/intractable parts and progress stalls, usually to be abandoned.

There are a couple of doctorates available for folks who are willing to research and publish in this space --- the commercial products are all holding their solutions as trade secrets in their code --- even then though, the edge cases are increasingly difficulty to solve in such a way as to not break what is already working, hence the commercial kernels having _very_ large teams working on them, or at least that is my understanding from what Michael Gibson (former lead developer of Rhino 3D, current developer of Moment of Inspiration 3D) has written on the topic.

What's wrong with OCCT?

The entire FreeCAD development philosophy is to not compare FreeCAD with commercial CAD tools. That's a cardinal sin. Basically, they are completely hostile to feedback from people who've spent their entire career doing CAD.

> Basically, they are completely hostile to feedback from people who've spent their entire career doing CAD.

There's an entire working group in the project comprised of people who have spent their entire career doing CAD and now take care of making FreeCAD get on par with proprietary counterparts.

There are numerous discussions online where users have constructive conversations with FreeCAD devs and provide useful input to mutual benefit.

Would you care to point me to a discussion where an actual FreeCAD contributor is completely hostile to someone like you?