Just used it to do a clean install to move my ThinkPad from Ubuntu 22.04 to Kubuntu 23.10. Good tool, and much nicer than constantly "burning" ISOs to the flash drive.
wjrii
joined 2 years ago
My WFH officemate is a 25 year old Cockatiel named Spike. He no longer really wants to come out of his cage, and on the rare occasion he does he doesn't so much fly as fall with style. That said, he's still spunky and loud and interactive and climbs all over his cage and has attracted interest from a local hawk on multiple occasions. He is my little buddy, even though my wife got him before we met. When he was younger, he would hang out on my shoulder (and poop on it) and could even be coaxed to fly over to me.
Definitely got the air cleaner running 24x7, though. SO MUCH dander.
Yeah, that is sort of what I've been noticing, and also with my experience initially wrapping my head around constraint-based drafting. I think the thing I'm still seeing though is that FreeCAD fails less gracefully than some of the commercial packages if you do things that are difficult to constrain, and in brief experimenting it seemed to be less willing to autoconstrain while drafting, particularly with easily changed dimensional constraints. I still feel comfortable saying it's a bit "persnickety," but agree that it's not the hell I used to think it was.
Does the OpenSCAD workbench count?! 🤣
For straight up ease of use, maybe try the current Direct Modeling version of Shapr3D (i,e, not the Beta). The free tier is useless for printing anything, but it's a great way to see if the workflow fits you. DS Mechanical, limited as it is, is also free and pretty usable if you have literally no import/export needs from other software, and its STLs are fine to print. Both are a little more intuitive for non-CAD people. Oddly enough, the big thing missing in the FOSS space is a decent direct modeler_. It's kind of a shame, too, since so much hobbyist use has minimal need for strict constraints, collaboration tools, or parametric history.
Now, because high quality direct modelers are a bit niche, and often use sketches anyway, it makes sense to get a basic grasp on sketch-based CAD, whether fully parametric or not. The paradigm that was so different for me to get used to is that idea of "sketch and extrude". You don't just plop down a cube or sphere.
Instead, you go into 2D mode, select a "workplane" which (you often start with the generic XY plane), and you draw the cross section of your solid. Then you use extrude or pull or pad or whatever the app calls it; this adds the third dimension to make it a solid. If you wanted a cube, draw a square of n mm, then extrude to the same height. Oh crap! That needed to be a rectangle? In a parametric modeler, go back to the sketch and change it, then (if needed) do the same for the extrusion's height. For various flavors of direct modelers, you can pull that face, or click the sides to change the size, just do it over, or add the extra volume and boolean them together. The next big concept is placing workplanes. There's typically some button that pulls up a tool that lets you do your sketch directly on a face of the solids you already have (or on an "arbitrary" plane placed exactly in line with a face... NO TOPOLOGICAL ISSUE HERE!) Once you do THAT, you can extrude down into the old solid to cut stuff out of it (sometimes this will need to be done with booleans, but often the apps have a "remove shit" set of buttons or are smart enough to guess what you meant), or extrude out from the old solid to glom stuff onto it. Fillets and chamfers, when supported, usually work by selecting one or more edges and telling the app to calculate them away at a certain radius/distance.
In the end I feel you on wanting to like freecad, I’d really rather use a Foss solution for my personal work.
I just downloaded The Ondsel "flavor" of FreeCAD. It's based on the upcoming 0.22 release, and it includes an addon that integrates to their tiered PDM, but everything else is still completely free. I don't see anything mind-blowing, but it's a very nice update. UI improvements, mostly on the Part Design workbench, nice and legible dark theme, floating tree, better launch page, and floating user-enterable dimensions when sketching (pretty cool, and long overdue). I question the viability of their business model in the timeframe their VC's likely want, but for now they're plowing some amount of money into FreeCAD development.
the mouse controls are a bit whacky to me
Is it true that SW ties everything to the Middle button with various modifier keys? And doesn't let you change anything? I've used a LOT of different 3D software over the last 45 days or so, and honestly that would be (if true) among the wackiest I've run across. FreeCAD has 10 preset styles now, and one or more of them might work for you.
Solidworks Maker
Here is the cheapest deal I've found on it (it's well known, I didn't have to do any detective work or anything). $38 for a year is probably worth it just for the shits and giggles, but as I mentioned, there's just no reasonable path for the home-business that manages to pull in $3-5k of profit. Lock-in is the bread and butter for all the companies, big and small, and a big part of this exercise has been to see just what I'd be locking myself into.
"Does loops and conditionals" == "is code", at least in my book, but my book is old and majored in English Lit. ;-)
Admittedly, OpenSCAD is not really robust as a language, hence its forks and competitors.
My little part is sort of a low grade torture test for fillets, but I am not very scientific with controlling it or looking for alternatives. It usually seems to be the ellipse sticking out the side like the Florida peninsula that gives the kernels/apps issues. It doesn't take a super huge fillet to get to a point where the face gets too closed off and the calculation refuses to complete. Some might do better with blending one edge at a time. In the real world, most of these apps could get most single parts modeled acceptably, one way or another. To a certain extent I'm splitting hairs, but I do like to see what they can handle. I've only had reason to loft parts a couple of times, but I can see that being an entirely new can of worms to explore.
That’s a crazy number of tools to try.
Some in more depth than others, LOL. YMMV.
I mean, the license is right, the functionality for single parts is there, and the workarounds are known. The issues are large assemblies, slower workflow, possibly stability, and weird UI, but I think if you've broken through the wall with it, there's little reason to change until you can no longer do what you want, whether that's large assemblies, paid freelance drafting (with customer expectations as to file format), or something else.
Going to have to try it! The LGPL gives them a lot of flexibility to do what they want, but I'm guessing the existence of FreeCAD will prevent them from locking it down too much.
Yup. PTC owns OnShape, so they have no need or incentive to make Creo Parametric accessible to the little guys, so they do not. :-)
Same deal with Siemens and NX (Solid Edge), and to a lesser extent Autodesk with Inventor (F360). It's really only Dassault that seems to be trying to appeal to small-time users with the main package, but it seems like they are not committed to that, just currently unopposed.
They seem to offer a very generous scheme and seem like they are really in it to make a product they can be proud of. It seems like it's a really good direct modeler, especially with the grasshopper addon. I'm a couple of decades too late for an educational license though.