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>no realistic future prospects Why? I've gotten far enough with FreeCAD despite its annoyances that I would be tempted to look into solving the problems with t

by vba616 4y ago

>no realistic future prospects Why? I've gotten far enough with FreeCAD despite its annoyances that I would be tempted to look into solving the problems with the kernel, and here you are discouraging people like me from getting involved by saying it's hopeless. The culture of constantly losing interest and starting over in many areas of software is one of the things I dislike the most. But I don't fight the tide.

imtringued 4y ago
I don't even think that the biggest problems have anything to do with the geometry kernel. The entire UI in general could be overhauled without touching the kernel and it would make the difference between highly usable and productive CAD program with some limitations vs incomprehensible mess.
- ezst 4y ago
  Not OP, but that sounds unnecessarily harsh. FreeCAD is much more approachable now than it was few years ago. It's definitely far from perfect, but it's getting substantially better and we should collectively encourage that. I also realized during that time that my distro was doing a poor job at packaging it to make it work as designed (and I can't fault the packagers for that, it's a highly specialized/niche application after all). The flatpak version seem much more cohesive. If one thing, I'm amazed by how much one can accomplish with FreeCAD given a little patience and perseverance: it brings parametric CAD, drawing projections FEM… to the masses, which, when I was learning that stuff as part of my curriculum, was completely out of reach of most universities, let alone the hobbyist scene. It's an under-appreciated, fundamental, piece of software if you ask me.
  - vba616 4y ago
    FreeCAD, for me, has been extremely frustrating, but it has convinced me, coming from OpenSCAD and not a regular CAD background, that a constraint solver and features like fillets or the curves workbench are really things I was missing and didn't know it. FEA is tantalizing, but I haven't been able to accomplish much yet.
- vba616 4y ago
  A significant part of the "incomprehensible mess" seems to be that errors from the kernel have no context. If you ask in a forum, people just kind of shrug. It's not clear on which side the bug really is in such a situation.

by vba616 4y ago

imtringued 4y ago

I don't even think that the biggest problems have anything to do with the geometry kernel. The entire UI in general could be overhauled without touching the kernel and it would make the difference between highly usable and productive CAD program with some limitations vs incomprehensible mess.

ezst 4y ago
Not OP, but that sounds unnecessarily harsh. FreeCAD is much more approachable now than it was few years ago. It's definitely far from perfect, but it's getting substantially better and we should collectively encourage that. I also realized during that time that my distro was doing a poor job at packaging it to make it work as designed (and I can't fault the packagers for that, it's a highly specialized/niche application after all). The flatpak version seem much more cohesive. If one thing, I'm amazed by how much one can accomplish with FreeCAD given a little patience and perseverance: it brings parametric CAD, drawing projections FEM… to the masses, which, when I was learning that stuff as part of my curriculum, was completely out of reach of most universities, let alone the hobbyist scene. It's an under-appreciated, fundamental, piece of software if you ask me.
- vba616 4y ago
  FreeCAD, for me, has been extremely frustrating, but it has convinced me, coming from OpenSCAD and not a regular CAD background, that a constraint solver and features like fillets or the curves workbench are really things I was missing and didn't know it. FEA is tantalizing, but I haven't been able to accomplish much yet.
vba616 4y ago
A significant part of the "incomprehensible mess" seems to be that errors from the kernel have no context. If you ask in a forum, people just kind of shrug. It's not clear on which side the bug really is in such a situation.