It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you’d love alternatives for?
I think FreeCAD is still the best bet, it does.seem to be making a few strides recently. Topo naming and sketcher workbench are both getting updates. For me personally it’s definitely usable for personal projects. I want better FreeCAD rather than an alternative new thing.
Yeah I should look up some tutorials for it. I jumped in thinking I could figure it out after working with Creo, Solidworks and AutoCAD but I should have RTFM.
Haha, I’m in an awkward place with FreeCAD, I love it for what it is, but I’m definitely not saying it’s without its shortcomings. The latest dev build seemingly has some great QoL upgrades for the sketcher. The topo naming issue is an absolute pain and the various assembly workbenches can be excruciating to work with at times. Everything takes longer than bigger CAD packages too.
I can normally get there in the end though. The principals are the same, sketch/pad/pocket/fillet etc. there are definite issues with the underlying CAD kernel as well, fillets are just batshit sometimes (like, it won’t round an edge, let’s you round an exact mirror of the edge on the other side of the model, you close the program and open it again and now you can round the edge).
Honestly, I think they can get there - probably more direction in the project would get it further and more paid devs working on core components would help (for instance there’s a guitar design workbench but no midpoint constraint in sketcher, but it’s open source and someone wanted to build a guitar design workbench and that’s that) I suspect they don’t get anything like the funding Blender does (160k+ pcm) which is probably needed for a number of years to get it where it needs to be.