Omg yes. I actually tried using that after my Fusion360 student license expired and the amount of time it took me just to extrude a basic shape was insane.
You want to make a midplane, a reference plane midway between to parallel planes. You click the Datum Plane button, and then the two parallel planes, and you get a plane that is perpendicular to both, not parallel halftway between. I found it easier to forget how to need midplanes than to get FreeCAD to make one.
There’s some cool concepts in there, I make heavy use of the spreadsheet function, but I swear to every god in every pantheon that Autodesk is paying the FreeCAD development community to keep their UX at least this horrible to preserve their business model. I can’t explain this level of incompetence any other way without relying on rock chewing stupidity.
I love that FreeCAD exists and use it often, but I really hate how much you have to “fight” the UI. I even briefly considered learning OpenSCAD out of frustration with the ui and the toponaming problem (before realizing that switching to OpenSCAD would just shift my frustration onto Javascript fuckery).
Now that the latter is fixed, though, I have just forced myself to forget how to do things the “normal” CAD way (i.e. using patterns and flows that most other software has standardized around) and instead how to do them the FreeCAD way.
I hope at some point we get an overhaul of the UX, but in the meantime I’ll grin and bear it since I have yet to find an even remotely comparable F/OSS CAD software that works the same on both Linux and Windows.
I want him to do FreeCAD.
Omg yes. I actually tried using that after my Fusion360 student license expired and the amount of time it took me just to extrude a basic shape was insane.
You want to make a midplane, a reference plane midway between to parallel planes. You click the Datum Plane button, and then the two parallel planes, and you get a plane that is perpendicular to both, not parallel halftway between. I found it easier to forget how to need midplanes than to get FreeCAD to make one.
There’s some cool concepts in there, I make heavy use of the spreadsheet function, but I swear to every god in every pantheon that Autodesk is paying the FreeCAD development community to keep their UX at least this horrible to preserve their business model. I can’t explain this level of incompetence any other way without relying on rock chewing stupidity.
I love that FreeCAD exists and use it often, but I really hate how much you have to “fight” the UI. I even briefly considered learning OpenSCAD out of frustration with the ui and the toponaming problem (before realizing that switching to OpenSCAD would just shift my frustration onto Javascript fuckery).
Now that the latter is fixed, though, I have just forced myself to forget how to do things the “normal” CAD way (i.e. using patterns and flows that most other software has standardized around) and instead how to do them the FreeCAD way.
I hope at some point we get an overhaul of the UX, but in the meantime I’ll grin and bear it since I have yet to find an even remotely comparable F/OSS CAD software that works the same on both Linux and Windows.