9 ms·

Time to invest the comparable amount of money in FOSS alternatives? FreeCAD, LibreCAD, BRL-CAD, and so on.

by xvilka 3y ago

jakeogh 3y ago
I just did a project in build123d, imho its drastically better than drawing in a gui. https://github.com/gumyr/build123d https://github.com/gumyr/build123d
j-bos 3y ago
It's a challenge. Look at Linux vs Windows. Modern distros are a drop in replacement for Windows, minus the user hostility, yet people continue with Windows because change is hard, not to mention matching everyone else. So, even if OSS CAD became a drop in replacement for Autodesk, there's gotta be something extra to truly bite at Autodesk.
- CodesInChaos 3y ago
  Which distributions? I switched some of my machines due to the increasing user hostility in Windows, but found it a big pain in the ass, even as a developer. And that's not even considering how many programs/games will only work on Windows.
  - j-bos 3y ago
    I've had an easy install and daily use with Mint.
    - CodesInChaos 3y ago
      I've had plenty of problems with Mint on my work laptop. For example: * Regularly swapped itself into a screen freeze. Possibly because it defaulted the swap partition to 1 GB. * Default boot partition was too small, so it ran out of space for new kernels. I have to manually remove kernels because the auto-remove is too slow to stay below the limit. * Hibernate doesn't work out of the box. I managed to figure out that I have to install some other cryptically named package, otherwise `sudo pm-hibernate` fails without printing an error message. Then a distribution upgrade removed the required package from the repos. And that's just making the command line tool work, it doesn't add it to the power manager so it triggers automatically after an idle period or when closing the laptop lid. I encountered similar issues on my gaming desktop running mint (e.g. the nvidia driver wouldn't load for no discernible reason) and steam deck.
      - taeric 3y ago
        Following here from my thread. Odd that you have partition woes, to me. That said, I have defaulted, for a long time, to not have fancy partition schemes. Where fancy is embarrassingly vague, of course; but the general idea is that extra partitions are largely solving problems from decades past. Worse, it leads to the swap and kernel space problems rather quickly. Though, swap into freezes is new to me. Hibernate is one that I have heard a ton of troubles with. Largely with laptops. Good luck getting past it. I am surprised you have had issues with the steam deck. That thing has been rock solid for me. Almost certainly my luck on the games I prefer. Edit: I do want to underline my point about luck on my part. And good luck to you! I don't claim to have a panacea here. I also don't think it is some failing of anyone that some folks would stick with Windows or other.
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    Give Manjaro a try. Not perfect but on all hardware I installed it ran flawlessly with all hardware detected out of the box with no need to install anything, either from a CD or online. Only single exception being a big network printer (Canon, IIRC) which in the end only required to go to openprinting.org, download the relevand ppd (just a few kbytes) and give it to Cups when configuring the new printer, which was already correctly detected btw. As a Debian user (which I love but would not recommend to newbies) I've tried Ubuntu in the past but didn't like it at all; Manjaro in my opinion is the best one for moving away from Windows in the most painless way.
    - Ballas 3y ago
      I am a big fan of Manjaro as a distro, but I would not recommend it to someone coming from Windows simply because things move fast and break - I've personally had proprietary software that worked at first, but later broke because libc had moved on. My solution (after trying plenty of workarounds) was to run it in an Ubuntu docker, but that upgrade cost me a lot of time and I don't expect somebody coming from Windows to put up with that much pain. I also don't want to recommend Ubuntu (if I had to pick a single reason it would be snap), but from a problem-googleability-index point of view, it's hard to beat. Perhaps Mint, because it's mostly Ubuntu, but without snap (last I checked).
  - taeric 3y ago
    A lot if this will boil down to what you found to be a pain. I hate to "give you more work," but do you have a list of things that you found particularly difficult?
    - CodesInChaos 3y ago
      It's death by a thousand paper cuts. No problems are a real blocker for somebody who is good with tech, but it's still more effort that I'd like to spend. I'm willing to endure that because Microsoft has become too user hostile since Win10. But I don't see how a non technical person is supposed to deal with it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36549295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36549295 has some of my complaints about my work laptop
  - Topfi 3y ago
    My recommendation would be Fedora Silverblue[0]. I have for years used different flavors of Ubuntu and Arch, but must admit, I always had some issues, no matter the distro. Mind you, purely counting the problems, the amount was either comparable or slightly less than what I tended to encounter on Windows installs, but still, I get that adding any issues on top of less familiarity and lower software compatibility is a hard sell for the average person. Then, I tried Fedora, more specifically Silverblue, for the first time in a while and was blown away. Everything worked. More to the point, I could not break the install even when actively trying to. Software was bleeding edge but stable, the kernel the most current version without issues, immutability prevents even the most idiotic mistake on the user's part, no update ever caused any issue. The concurrent rise of Proton and Bottles for Games made it even more appealing. Then, something followed that would cement my reverence for Silverblue: At the time, I had recently gotten an AMD Renoir based laptop. Silverblue ran perfectly, GPU acceleration, sleep, connectivity, all out of the box as if the notebook had been designed for Fedora. Still, I made a Windows install as a fallback. Unlike with Silverblue which, thanks to Kernel support for the GPU, needed no additional configuration, Windows of course required drivers from AMD. Upon installing them, I quickly noticed crashes, instability and resolution issues. Turned out, Windows update had overwritten the newest driver I had installed with an older, incompatible version. No problem, I thought, annoying and not something one should have to troubleshoot on a for-profit OS, but manageable. Used DDU to remove that, installed the current driver, again, overwritten by Windows Update. Repeated the process, this time manually blacklisting the specific update. Still, that got consistently and painfully reset every time there was an update. I understand that not everyone believes in having full control over their system. I also understand that delivering drivers via Windows Update is a valuable tool for some people. But if those drivers are faulty, taking away any graphics acceleration and causing crashes and you take away my ability to address that issue by overwriting my changes, I have a hard time seeing my money well spent at Microsoft. Since then, I have migrated away from Windows entirely. It helps that I prefer single player story driven experiences and rhythm games, both being well covered by Proton thanks to the general lack of AntiCheat. Aside from my Fedora systems, I have a MBP, but Ventura has its pain points as well. Simply, nothing has ever been as rock solid as Fedora Silverblue and, as much as Red Hat is currently heading in the wrong direction[1], I have to give them credit for Silverblue and Fedora Workstation. Those continue to prove more stable than anything I have ever experienced with Windows, macOS or any other Linux distro, regardless of hardware. [0] https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/ https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/ [1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripples/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripp...
- jansan 3y ago
  I have been hearing this for 25 years now (no exaggeration). Not sure if distros are really as good now, because I gave up trying long time ago, but I suspect they still suck if you are not a very tech affine user. And I blame the Linux community for promising much more than they were able to deliver.
- solarkraft 3y ago
  This attitude is harmful. There are legitimate (or maybe illegitimate in your view, but real) reasons people have to stick with proprietary software. As long as these aren't solved, people can't switch. While free software may not have a marketing budget, its freedom aspect is generally an inherent advantage over other software (no licensing, no user hostility). There may be proprietary alternatives to Aufacity and Gimp, but nobody knows them because the FOSS versions are so easy to get. If there are two largely equivalent pieces of software, one proprietary and the other FOSS, the FOSS one will win. It just has to be good enough. But it has to be good enough. We shouldn't delude ourselves that Gimp is in the same playing field as Photoshop, for instance; as much as I'd like it to be. FreeCAD is getting better and getting quite decent for hobby stuff (I still find Fusion much more intuitive, but it's getting alright), but we can't just go "why doesn't everybody switch, they must be dumb", just because we are happy with the functionality. This isn't specifically directed at you, but a specific FOSS-high-horse attitude I see every now and then and used to hold myself. I think it's something that keeps FOSS from gaining market share by solving real problems people have. I could tell you a bunch of stories of people trying really hard to switch and ending up in a world of pain. We can't hand-wave that away. We have to actually improve the things we want people to use.
  - j-bos 3y ago
    I agree, on your point of resolving limitations which prevent switching, is there a standard, or hub for listing limitations, bugs, inconveniences according to how much friction they provide potential adopters?
  - Silhouette 3y ago
    But it has to be good enough. We shouldn't delude ourselves that Gimp is in the same playing field as Photoshop, for instance; as much as I'd like it to be. This is the key point that is forever being overlooked by FOSS evangelists. Take a look at the most well known FOSS alternatives for everyday software that a lot of people use like a word processor, spreadsheet or graphics package. We have applications like the LibreOffice suite, the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. For personal or hobbyist use they're very worthy efforts and it's great that we have these things freely available. But for professional use when quality is essential and time is money they aren't even close. For years these totemic FOSS products have mostly emulated the style of established proprietary applications but usually without the resources that the developers of those proprietary applications can employ because they're running commercially and charging real money for their products. That inevitably means the FOSS applications tend to have more limited functionality and less work gets done on vital areas like usability and documentation. Meanwhile if you look at the last few years in the rest of the software industry those kinds of applications have been getting pushed aside anyway. Browsers and online software that fundamentally changes the way we use software have taken over many areas. Products like Figma or Google Docs that have targeted specific markets well and taken advantage of the new platform have enjoyed enormous success even though they didn't necessarily compete 1:1 on features or offer fully compatible import/export with the established native software applications they might appear to compete with. And in the world of native applications we have the likes of the Affinity suite that was offering more credible competition for Adobe within a few years of the Creative Cloud subscription model being introduced than the much longer-established FOSS products ever have. That's partly because it also costs real money that can fund a full-time professional team to build the product. It's also partly because that team seems to have taken a fresh look at UI ideas - not an area where Adobe's graphics products have enjoyed a great reputation in the past - and managed to come up with something familiar yet also without a lot of the warts. That's what a successful FOSS competitor needs to do as well IMHO but it can only happen if the people leading the effort have a vision of something that changes the game and enough contributors are willing to help them turn that vision into reality. So far that has been the exception not the rule within the FOSS community. There will always be those who are fans and advocates of FOSS for other reasons and that's totally fine but it's also not enough to shift the professional communities that fund most software development to using and supporting the further development of FOSS instead.
- Ballas 3y ago
  > Modern distros are a drop in replacement for Windows I really want to agree, and I am a big advocate for using Linux exactly because of the hostility from Microsoft, but for most users it definitely is not a drop in replacement. For an average user that is used to Microsoft Office, the difference is simply too big. It might not be the best example, but just look at how Linus from LTT struggled to get one of the "most user-friendly" distros working.
  - taeric 3y ago
    For most users, Chromebooks work as a drop in. Most linux distros would be fine. This is especially true nowadays, as Steam has gone a LONG way to make gaming viable in linux.
- zirgs 3y ago
  When I last tried to use Linux - I was not able to install GPU drivers without using the terminal. Sorry, but that's not a drop-in replacement.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    Most GPUs have their drivers already built in - unlike on Windows. If you need proprietary Nvidia drivers, on most distros you just need to open the software center, search "nvidia" and click install. Honestly in this regard, Windows struggles to be a drop in replacement for Linux, not the other way around.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      That wasn't enough - I had to shut down the X server to install the driver properly. I make software that runs on Linux exclusively for a living. I know very well how Linux works. It is still necessary to run stuff from the terminal from time to time. Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows. And another thing. I could not get Thunderbolt working on Linux at all. It worked just fine on Windows on that same laptop.
      - Zambyte 3y ago
        > I had to shut down the X server to install the driver properly. And you would have to reboot on Windows. Rebooting would also restart your display server on Linux, so that is at worst equally as painful as Windows. > I know very well how Linux works. It is still necessary to run stuff from the terminal from time to time. Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows. I think you probably choose the command line way to do things because you "know very well how Linux works". The whole GPU driver installation process can be done without knowing what a terminal emulator is. If you choose to take advantage of your existing knowledge, that isn't a flaw of the system. > Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows. I have not opened a terminal on my Steam Deck with the intention of making a game work. The most I have ever had to do was copy launch options from steam reviews or ProtonDB. Sure, that's not perfect. And that still leaves a few games unplayable. At this point about 80~90% of games can simply run though, which is way more games than anyone has time to play, and is a sizeable catalog when compared to other gaming systems. It may not be a "drop in replacement" in the sense that it can play 100% of games, but functionally it is a drop in replacement. > And another thing. I could not get Thunderbolt working on Linux at all. It worked just fine on Windows on that same laptop. I'm a noob when it comes to thunderbolt vs usb-c vs whatever else looks identical. I dock my work laptop (which runs Fedora) with some usb-c-like dock though and I didn't have to do anything to get it to work. I don't have anything to add other than that anecdote.
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
FreeCAD is the closest, but unlike the Eagle vs Kicad comparison, it's miles behind Inventor and Solid works. I just bought a lifetime license for Alibre CAD, it's for profit closed source but much more usable. FreeCAD needs a benefactor like CERN for KiCAD to bring it up to speed.
- amelius 3y ago
  Any recommendations for MacOS?
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  I try to use freeCAD whenever possible. I'm not a professional level, and assemblies are a bit scary, but its overall a nice tool. Just the other day I cloned one of these[1] in freecad using the image importing and scaling, quickly made a trace, added a pad and some chamfers, and had it on the 3d printer in about 25 minutes. I'd love if FreeCAD got a benefactor like you mention. [1]https://www.amazon.com/TILISMA-Book-Page-Holder-Accessories/dp/B07PGW7C8R?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/TILISMA-Book-Page-Holder-Accessories/...
  - alias_neo 3y ago
    The beauty of 3D printing, and the community is that you could have saved yourself some time and downloaded one of the many, many versions of this available online already. I want to love FreeCAD, but it is hard to work with for complex designs compared to other tools; topological naming has been an absolute nightmare, but I persevere, it's improving slowly. At least now I'm less likely to have to throw away hours/days of design because I got into a mess. As a Linux user, my options are slim, so I keep learning FreeCAD, and SCAD, but I'm always a little jealous when I watch a YouTube tutorial of how to do something that takes relative ease in tool X, but is an order of magnitude more complex to do in FreeCAD. FreeCAD getting a benefactor that can propel it ahead would be huge; donations are great, but my measly donation is barely going to cover the cost of a bug fix.
    - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
bearmode 3y ago
Has there ever been an example of an industry standard tool losing out to FOSS alternatives? Ever? There are reasons for that.
- DaOne256 3y ago
  Firefox, Chromium vs Internet Explorer, Opera, old Edge, even Netscape.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    There hasn’t really been a market for paid browsers since the mid 90s. If you’re giving put your software for free reusing OSS components makes a lot more sense KHTML -> webkit -> blink
- ppg677 3y ago
  Unix was a commercial standard that's lost out to Linux
- xvilka 3y ago
  Many. Perforce to Git. Many proprietary mobile operating systems to Android (partly FOSS but still).
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    Mobile OSes were always more of a cost center than a product in its own right. In these cases OSS tends to be way more competitive.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  20 years ago if you were serious about a system with an rdbms is was sybase or oracle. Now almost everything is postgres.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 3y ago
detourdog 3y ago
Has any tried SolveSpace? https://solvespace.com/index.pl https://solvespace.com/index.pl I'm considering digging in.
- junon 3y ago
  This looks really cool. I use freecad but find it really frustrating to use, this might be more my style. They also provide the geometric constraint solving algorithm separately as a library. Incredible.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    > They also provide the geometric constraint solving algorithm separately as a library. Indeed -- it's actually used in the FreeCAD Assembly 3 workbench as a solver (I think that supports switchable/pluggable alternatives now though)
- surfpel 3y ago
  I love solvespace. I basically only use solvespace now. It’s very lightweight and minimalistic, but it’s not the easiest to use and very bare bones. I often have to find new ways of building things to account for the lack of functions, such as filleting an edge. In a way it’s a good thing because it’s hard to over complicate a design with unnecessary features, which I tend to do, but my designs in solvespace aren’t as nice or pretty and everything takes longer than inventor or fusion, but it takes half a second to boot up, I love the UI, and I really don’t need a complicated CAD tool for the vast majority of my projects. The other caveat is that like any FOSS CAD tool it’s not totally stable and certain actions may get you into a bad state and possibly crash the program, but eventually you get used to it and can work around them (so far as I’ve seen). If you’re just doing simple hobby projects, I’d say it’s worth trying out but it does take a little time to get used to. For professional endeavors it’s probably not gonna do the job.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    That actually sounds like a pretty positive review. Have you done anything with the gcode paths? I guess one just works through the tutorials until you on your own.
zirgs 3y ago
Thank god there's Blender so 3D artists don't have to pay the ridiculous price for 3ds max and Maya. (Why the hell was Autodesk allowed to buy Maya?)
- NikkiA 3y ago
  Because at the time SoftImage was still around, which meant that Autodesk owning 3ds max and maya didn't form a monopoly. Of course, Adobe now owns the defunct SoftImage brand anyway after Avid ran it into the ground.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Autodesk bought Softimage|XSI and then simply killed it after a few years. It's crazy that they can get rid of their competitors this easily. Another reason why I recommend all 3D artists to learn Blender. Nobody can buy and then kill it off. I'm pretty sure Autodesk would love to do that if they could.
bioemerl 3y ago
I've been learning it thanks to this amazing tutorial series by a guy named mangojelly. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc0UszswD0oD5q4VeWTrK7JC https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc0UszswD0oD... freeCAD had a critical issue in topological naming (they are working on a fix as we speak and it's going to be out "soon"), and it's hideously clunky. Basically, when you resize a sketch and that causes more faces to be created it makes all your other stuff go crazy. You can also use realthunders branch which fixes the naming issue as well. Mangos videos teach you a bit how to think reasonably though freecads infuriating errors, too. The guy is worth a watch if you want to start using the best open source tool. freeCAD sucks, until you learn it, and then it works alright. Learn to use data planes instead of sketch on face and the topo naming isn't even an issue anymore.
- grawlinson 3y ago
  Do you know if any of the official FreeCAD tutorials go through using data planes instead of sketch on face?
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    It isn't really the right solution. Datum planes are usually unnecessary; cluttering up a design with a plane per sketch is certainly the wrong way to go about it. You can place each sketch with the same tools you place a datum plane -- by editing the attachment and attachment position. (You just can't do it at the point of creating the sketch in the same way as you can when creating a plane). You can then use expressions in those positions, including e.g. the width/depth/length of other objects (using the length of another Pad would be one very common scenario). Or you can use values from a Spreadsheet. And TNP won't always bite you anyway. It's possibly better to learn how to fix attachment issues than clutter up your design with datum planes. Learning how to place sketches in arbitrary space is so core to FreeCAD that it's probably worth going through the pain on this. Datum planes do have uses -- like when you want to attach large numbers of sketches to a single plane, or when you want to model some arbitrary plane without using physical geometry. They are also useful for e.g. cutting holes up to a face (because the plane can substitute for a face) They are also helpful, I find, when I am using an LCS for some feature. But quite often you see people trying to work around TNP with a datum plane, only to attach that plane to the same object that will have the TNP. This tutorial on attachment may help you (it's a bit involved) https://wiki.freecad.org/Basic_Attachment_Tutorial https://wiki.freecad.org/Basic_Attachment_Tutorial But the various Mango Jelly videos about sketch attachments are well worth watching.
serf 3y ago
I'm with you in the spirit of hurting Autodesk, but the FOSS alternatives, while able to produce a similar product, simply use different metaphors and concepts then F360/Inventor/etc do. It's not like the switch from WinRAR to 7-Zip, it's a long ordeal of the (possibly already overloaded) designer learning how to do everything over again. There is very little carry-over aside from general design knowledge; and it may take a very long time for that person to become productive in whatever they choose - which by that time their just-learned software package may be the new software package to hate. All I mean to express is that it takes a lot more than a money investment. F360 only remains dominant because -- pardon the expression -- they have a lot of us by the balls in some way. I'd love to break free, but those that pay for my design work will be hard-pressed to understand the sudden drop in productivity, the worse deliverables/renderings/the lessened compatibility with file types/the list goes on. It feels like the competitors need to cover some ground before a reasonable expectation can be made for the people that have to pay the bills with it to move over.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  I would also like to add that part of the value of Fusion 360 and similar packages is that they use either the Parasolid Kernel (developed by Siemens), or the ACIS Kernel (developed by Dassault Systemes), or a variant (I think AutoCAD has their own ACIS fork from long ago). If you use either of those kernels, you can handle incredibly complex geometry (or even just things that seem simple but aren't, like Fillets) with ease and good compatibility with other programs. Both of those kernels started development in the late 1980s. Parasolid alone claims over 350 3D Programs license their system. FreeCAD uses OpenCASCADE, because it's the only free option. You will notice that almost no other 3D Program, paid or free, uses it. OpenCASCADE is, compared to Parasolid or ACIS; buggy, broken, incomplete, unergonomic, and obsolete. There is almost no commercial software that uses it - they all find it better to license Parasolid or ACIS despite the heavy royalties those packages require. This puts FreeCAD in kind of a chicken-or-egg situation. The geometry kernel they use is considered unanimously inferior to the licensed kernels for almost every task, to the point that even people building new CAD programs (like the recent Plasticity beta) don't even consider it as an option. The 3D packages that license the kernels think that rebuilding ~35 years of work with extremely complex math equations requiring dozens, or even hundreds, of PhD-level math professors is too much work to justify not paying a license fee. To them, it's like saying we should rebuild Windows, but it's PhD-level math instead of APIs.
xvilka 3y ago
There is also a new competitor written in Lazarus/FPC - ZCAD[1]. Looks barebones for now, but nevertheless interesting. [1] https://github.com/zamtmn/zcad https://github.com/zamtmn/zcad
- avhon1 3y ago
  Looking through the features and issues, it looks like this is a 2D CAD program, like AutoCAD or LibreCAD, instead of a 3D parametric CAD program.
- Blackthorn 3y ago
  That's unfortunately closely named to zwcad/zw3d, which is a commercial product but extremely excellent.
paulclinger 3y ago
I recently came across CadZinho (https://github.com/zecruel/CadZinho https://github.com/zecruel/CadZinho), which is MIT-licensed, cross-platform (also works in a browser) and uses Lua as its extension language.

Time to invest the comparable amount of money in FOSS alternatives? FreeCAD, LibreCAD, BRL-CAD, and so on.

by xvilka 3y ago

Time to invest the comparable amount of money in FOSS alternatives? FreeCAD, LibreCAD, BRL-CAD, and so on.

I just did a project in build123d, imho its drastically better than drawing in a gui. https://github.com/gumyr/build123d https://github.com/gumyr/build123d

j-bos 3y ago

It's a challenge. Look at Linux vs Windows. Modern distros are a drop in replacement for Windows, minus the user hostility, yet people continue with Windows because change is hard, not to mention matching everyone else. So, even if OSS CAD became a drop in replacement for Autodesk, there's gotta be something extra to truly bite at Autodesk.

CodesInChaos 3y ago
Which distributions? I switched some of my machines due to the increasing user hostility in Windows, but found it a big pain in the ass, even as a developer. And that's not even considering how many programs/games will only work on Windows.
- j-bos 3y ago
  I've had an easy install and daily use with Mint.
  - CodesInChaos 3y ago
    I've had plenty of problems with Mint on my work laptop. For example: * Regularly swapped itself into a screen freeze. Possibly because it defaulted the swap partition to 1 GB. * Default boot partition was too small, so it ran out of space for new kernels. I have to manually remove kernels because the auto-remove is too slow to stay below the limit. * Hibernate doesn't work out of the box. I managed to figure out that I have to install some other cryptically named package, otherwise `sudo pm-hibernate` fails without printing an error message. Then a distribution upgrade removed the required package from the repos. And that's just making the command line tool work, it doesn't add it to the power manager so it triggers automatically after an idle period or when closing the laptop lid. I encountered similar issues on my gaming desktop running mint (e.g. the nvidia driver wouldn't load for no discernible reason) and steam deck.
    - taeric 3y ago
      Following here from my thread. Odd that you have partition woes, to me. That said, I have defaulted, for a long time, to not have fancy partition schemes. Where fancy is embarrassingly vague, of course; but the general idea is that extra partitions are largely solving problems from decades past. Worse, it leads to the swap and kernel space problems rather quickly. Though, swap into freezes is new to me. Hibernate is one that I have heard a ton of troubles with. Largely with laptops. Good luck getting past it. I am surprised you have had issues with the steam deck. That thing has been rock solid for me. Almost certainly my luck on the games I prefer. Edit: I do want to underline my point about luck on my part. And good luck to you! I don't claim to have a panacea here. I also don't think it is some failing of anyone that some folks would stick with Windows or other.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Give Manjaro a try. Not perfect but on all hardware I installed it ran flawlessly with all hardware detected out of the box with no need to install anything, either from a CD or online. Only single exception being a big network printer (Canon, IIRC) which in the end only required to go to openprinting.org, download the relevand ppd (just a few kbytes) and give it to Cups when configuring the new printer, which was already correctly detected btw. As a Debian user (which I love but would not recommend to newbies) I've tried Ubuntu in the past but didn't like it at all; Manjaro in my opinion is the best one for moving away from Windows in the most painless way.
  - Ballas 3y ago
    I am a big fan of Manjaro as a distro, but I would not recommend it to someone coming from Windows simply because things move fast and break - I've personally had proprietary software that worked at first, but later broke because libc had moved on. My solution (after trying plenty of workarounds) was to run it in an Ubuntu docker, but that upgrade cost me a lot of time and I don't expect somebody coming from Windows to put up with that much pain. I also don't want to recommend Ubuntu (if I had to pick a single reason it would be snap), but from a problem-googleability-index point of view, it's hard to beat. Perhaps Mint, because it's mostly Ubuntu, but without snap (last I checked).
- taeric 3y ago
  A lot if this will boil down to what you found to be a pain. I hate to "give you more work," but do you have a list of things that you found particularly difficult?
  - CodesInChaos 3y ago
    It's death by a thousand paper cuts. No problems are a real blocker for somebody who is good with tech, but it's still more effort that I'd like to spend. I'm willing to endure that because Microsoft has become too user hostile since Win10. But I don't see how a non technical person is supposed to deal with it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36549295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36549295 has some of my complaints about my work laptop
- Topfi 3y ago
  My recommendation would be Fedora Silverblue[0]. I have for years used different flavors of Ubuntu and Arch, but must admit, I always had some issues, no matter the distro. Mind you, purely counting the problems, the amount was either comparable or slightly less than what I tended to encounter on Windows installs, but still, I get that adding any issues on top of less familiarity and lower software compatibility is a hard sell for the average person. Then, I tried Fedora, more specifically Silverblue, for the first time in a while and was blown away. Everything worked. More to the point, I could not break the install even when actively trying to. Software was bleeding edge but stable, the kernel the most current version without issues, immutability prevents even the most idiotic mistake on the user's part, no update ever caused any issue. The concurrent rise of Proton and Bottles for Games made it even more appealing. Then, something followed that would cement my reverence for Silverblue: At the time, I had recently gotten an AMD Renoir based laptop. Silverblue ran perfectly, GPU acceleration, sleep, connectivity, all out of the box as if the notebook had been designed for Fedora. Still, I made a Windows install as a fallback. Unlike with Silverblue which, thanks to Kernel support for the GPU, needed no additional configuration, Windows of course required drivers from AMD. Upon installing them, I quickly noticed crashes, instability and resolution issues. Turned out, Windows update had overwritten the newest driver I had installed with an older, incompatible version. No problem, I thought, annoying and not something one should have to troubleshoot on a for-profit OS, but manageable. Used DDU to remove that, installed the current driver, again, overwritten by Windows Update. Repeated the process, this time manually blacklisting the specific update. Still, that got consistently and painfully reset every time there was an update. I understand that not everyone believes in having full control over their system. I also understand that delivering drivers via Windows Update is a valuable tool for some people. But if those drivers are faulty, taking away any graphics acceleration and causing crashes and you take away my ability to address that issue by overwriting my changes, I have a hard time seeing my money well spent at Microsoft. Since then, I have migrated away from Windows entirely. It helps that I prefer single player story driven experiences and rhythm games, both being well covered by Proton thanks to the general lack of AntiCheat. Aside from my Fedora systems, I have a MBP, but Ventura has its pain points as well. Simply, nothing has ever been as rock solid as Fedora Silverblue and, as much as Red Hat is currently heading in the wrong direction[1], I have to give them credit for Silverblue and Fedora Workstation. Those continue to prove more stable than anything I have ever experienced with Windows, macOS or any other Linux distro, regardless of hardware. [0] https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/ https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/ [1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripples/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripp...
jansan 3y ago
I have been hearing this for 25 years now (no exaggeration). Not sure if distros are really as good now, because I gave up trying long time ago, but I suspect they still suck if you are not a very tech affine user. And I blame the Linux community for promising much more than they were able to deliver.
solarkraft 3y ago
This attitude is harmful. There are legitimate (or maybe illegitimate in your view, but real) reasons people have to stick with proprietary software. As long as these aren't solved, people can't switch. While free software may not have a marketing budget, its freedom aspect is generally an inherent advantage over other software (no licensing, no user hostility). There may be proprietary alternatives to Aufacity and Gimp, but nobody knows them because the FOSS versions are so easy to get. If there are two largely equivalent pieces of software, one proprietary and the other FOSS, the FOSS one will win. It just has to be good enough. But it has to be good enough. We shouldn't delude ourselves that Gimp is in the same playing field as Photoshop, for instance; as much as I'd like it to be. FreeCAD is getting better and getting quite decent for hobby stuff (I still find Fusion much more intuitive, but it's getting alright), but we can't just go "why doesn't everybody switch, they must be dumb", just because we are happy with the functionality. This isn't specifically directed at you, but a specific FOSS-high-horse attitude I see every now and then and used to hold myself. I think it's something that keeps FOSS from gaining market share by solving real problems people have. I could tell you a bunch of stories of people trying really hard to switch and ending up in a world of pain. We can't hand-wave that away. We have to actually improve the things we want people to use.
- j-bos 3y ago
  I agree, on your point of resolving limitations which prevent switching, is there a standard, or hub for listing limitations, bugs, inconveniences according to how much friction they provide potential adopters?
- Silhouette 3y ago
  But it has to be good enough. We shouldn't delude ourselves that Gimp is in the same playing field as Photoshop, for instance; as much as I'd like it to be. This is the key point that is forever being overlooked by FOSS evangelists. Take a look at the most well known FOSS alternatives for everyday software that a lot of people use like a word processor, spreadsheet or graphics package. We have applications like the LibreOffice suite, the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. For personal or hobbyist use they're very worthy efforts and it's great that we have these things freely available. But for professional use when quality is essential and time is money they aren't even close. For years these totemic FOSS products have mostly emulated the style of established proprietary applications but usually without the resources that the developers of those proprietary applications can employ because they're running commercially and charging real money for their products. That inevitably means the FOSS applications tend to have more limited functionality and less work gets done on vital areas like usability and documentation. Meanwhile if you look at the last few years in the rest of the software industry those kinds of applications have been getting pushed aside anyway. Browsers and online software that fundamentally changes the way we use software have taken over many areas. Products like Figma or Google Docs that have targeted specific markets well and taken advantage of the new platform have enjoyed enormous success even though they didn't necessarily compete 1:1 on features or offer fully compatible import/export with the established native software applications they might appear to compete with. And in the world of native applications we have the likes of the Affinity suite that was offering more credible competition for Adobe within a few years of the Creative Cloud subscription model being introduced than the much longer-established FOSS products ever have. That's partly because it also costs real money that can fund a full-time professional team to build the product. It's also partly because that team seems to have taken a fresh look at UI ideas - not an area where Adobe's graphics products have enjoyed a great reputation in the past - and managed to come up with something familiar yet also without a lot of the warts. That's what a successful FOSS competitor needs to do as well IMHO but it can only happen if the people leading the effort have a vision of something that changes the game and enough contributors are willing to help them turn that vision into reality. So far that has been the exception not the rule within the FOSS community. There will always be those who are fans and advocates of FOSS for other reasons and that's totally fine but it's also not enough to shift the professional communities that fund most software development to using and supporting the further development of FOSS instead.
Ballas 3y ago
> Modern distros are a drop in replacement for Windows I really want to agree, and I am a big advocate for using Linux exactly because of the hostility from Microsoft, but for most users it definitely is not a drop in replacement. For an average user that is used to Microsoft Office, the difference is simply too big. It might not be the best example, but just look at how Linus from LTT struggled to get one of the "most user-friendly" distros working.
- taeric 3y ago
  For most users, Chromebooks work as a drop in. Most linux distros would be fine. This is especially true nowadays, as Steam has gone a LONG way to make gaming viable in linux.
zirgs 3y ago
When I last tried to use Linux - I was not able to install GPU drivers without using the terminal. Sorry, but that's not a drop-in replacement.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  Most GPUs have their drivers already built in - unlike on Windows. If you need proprietary Nvidia drivers, on most distros you just need to open the software center, search "nvidia" and click install. Honestly in this regard, Windows struggles to be a drop in replacement for Linux, not the other way around.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    That wasn't enough - I had to shut down the X server to install the driver properly. I make software that runs on Linux exclusively for a living. I know very well how Linux works. It is still necessary to run stuff from the terminal from time to time. Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows. And another thing. I could not get Thunderbolt working on Linux at all. It worked just fine on Windows on that same laptop.
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      > I had to shut down the X server to install the driver properly. And you would have to reboot on Windows. Rebooting would also restart your display server on Linux, so that is at worst equally as painful as Windows. > I know very well how Linux works. It is still necessary to run stuff from the terminal from time to time. Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows. I think you probably choose the command line way to do things because you "know very well how Linux works". The whole GPU driver installation process can be done without knowing what a terminal emulator is. If you choose to take advantage of your existing knowledge, that isn't a flaw of the system. > Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows. I have not opened a terminal on my Steam Deck with the intention of making a game work. The most I have ever had to do was copy launch options from steam reviews or ProtonDB. Sure, that's not perfect. And that still leaves a few games unplayable. At this point about 80~90% of games can simply run though, which is way more games than anyone has time to play, and is a sizeable catalog when compared to other gaming systems. It may not be a "drop in replacement" in the sense that it can play 100% of games, but functionally it is a drop in replacement. > And another thing. I could not get Thunderbolt working on Linux at all. It worked just fine on Windows on that same laptop. I'm a noob when it comes to thunderbolt vs usb-c vs whatever else looks identical. I dock my work laptop (which runs Fedora) with some usb-c-like dock though and I didn't have to do anything to get it to work. I don't have anything to add other than that anecdote.

LeifCarrotson 3y ago

FreeCAD is the closest, but unlike the Eagle vs Kicad comparison, it's miles behind Inventor and Solid works. I just bought a lifetime license for Alibre CAD, it's for profit closed source but much more usable. FreeCAD needs a benefactor like CERN for KiCAD to bring it up to speed.

amelius 3y ago
Any recommendations for MacOS?
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
I try to use freeCAD whenever possible. I'm not a professional level, and assemblies are a bit scary, but its overall a nice tool. Just the other day I cloned one of these[1] in freecad using the image importing and scaling, quickly made a trace, added a pad and some chamfers, and had it on the 3d printer in about 25 minutes. I'd love if FreeCAD got a benefactor like you mention. [1]https://www.amazon.com/TILISMA-Book-Page-Holder-Accessories/dp/B07PGW7C8R?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/TILISMA-Book-Page-Holder-Accessories/...
- alias_neo 3y ago
  The beauty of 3D printing, and the community is that you could have saved yourself some time and downloaded one of the many, many versions of this available online already. I want to love FreeCAD, but it is hard to work with for complex designs compared to other tools; topological naming has been an absolute nightmare, but I persevere, it's improving slowly. At least now I'm less likely to have to throw away hours/days of design because I got into a mess. As a Linux user, my options are slim, so I keep learning FreeCAD, and SCAD, but I'm always a little jealous when I watch a YouTube tutorial of how to do something that takes relative ease in tool X, but is an order of magnitude more complex to do in FreeCAD. FreeCAD getting a benefactor that can propel it ahead would be huge; donations are great, but my measly donation is barely going to cover the cost of a bug fix.
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago

bearmode 3y ago

Has there ever been an example of an industry standard tool losing out to FOSS alternatives? Ever? There are reasons for that.

DaOne256 3y ago
Firefox, Chromium vs Internet Explorer, Opera, old Edge, even Netscape.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  There hasn’t really been a market for paid browsers since the mid 90s. If you’re giving put your software for free reusing OSS components makes a lot more sense KHTML -> webkit -> blink
ppg677 3y ago
Unix was a commercial standard that's lost out to Linux
xvilka 3y ago
Many. Perforce to Git. Many proprietary mobile operating systems to Android (partly FOSS but still).
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  Mobile OSes were always more of a cost center than a product in its own right. In these cases OSS tends to be way more competitive.
seanhunter 3y ago
20 years ago if you were serious about a system with an rdbms is was sybase or oracle. Now almost everything is postgres.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
3y ago

detourdog 3y ago

Has any tried SolveSpace? https://solvespace.com/index.pl https://solvespace.com/index.pl I'm considering digging in.

junon 3y ago
This looks really cool. I use freecad but find it really frustrating to use, this might be more my style. They also provide the geometric constraint solving algorithm separately as a library. Incredible.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  > They also provide the geometric constraint solving algorithm separately as a library. Indeed -- it's actually used in the FreeCAD Assembly 3 workbench as a solver (I think that supports switchable/pluggable alternatives now though)
surfpel 3y ago
I love solvespace. I basically only use solvespace now. It’s very lightweight and minimalistic, but it’s not the easiest to use and very bare bones. I often have to find new ways of building things to account for the lack of functions, such as filleting an edge. In a way it’s a good thing because it’s hard to over complicate a design with unnecessary features, which I tend to do, but my designs in solvespace aren’t as nice or pretty and everything takes longer than inventor or fusion, but it takes half a second to boot up, I love the UI, and I really don’t need a complicated CAD tool for the vast majority of my projects. The other caveat is that like any FOSS CAD tool it’s not totally stable and certain actions may get you into a bad state and possibly crash the program, but eventually you get used to it and can work around them (so far as I’ve seen). If you’re just doing simple hobby projects, I’d say it’s worth trying out but it does take a little time to get used to. For professional endeavors it’s probably not gonna do the job.
- detourdog 3y ago
  That actually sounds like a pretty positive review. Have you done anything with the gcode paths? I guess one just works through the tutorials until you on your own.

zirgs 3y ago

Thank god there's Blender so 3D artists don't have to pay the ridiculous price for 3ds max and Maya. (Why the hell was Autodesk allowed to buy Maya?)

NikkiA 3y ago
Because at the time SoftImage was still around, which meant that Autodesk owning 3ds max and maya didn't form a monopoly. Of course, Adobe now owns the defunct SoftImage brand anyway after Avid ran it into the ground.
- zirgs 3y ago
  Autodesk bought Softimage|XSI and then simply killed it after a few years. It's crazy that they can get rid of their competitors this easily. Another reason why I recommend all 3D artists to learn Blender. Nobody can buy and then kill it off. I'm pretty sure Autodesk would love to do that if they could.

bioemerl 3y ago

I've been learning it thanks to this amazing tutorial series by a guy named mangojelly. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc0UszswD0oD5q4VeWTrK7JC https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc0UszswD0oD... freeCAD had a critical issue in topological naming (they are working on a fix as we speak and it's going to be out "soon"), and it's hideously clunky. Basically, when you resize a sketch and that causes more faces to be created it makes all your other stuff go crazy. You can also use realthunders branch which fixes the naming issue as well. Mangos videos teach you a bit how to think reasonably though freecads infuriating errors, too. The guy is worth a watch if you want to start using the best open source tool. freeCAD sucks, until you learn it, and then it works alright. Learn to use data planes instead of sketch on face and the topo naming isn't even an issue anymore.

grawlinson 3y ago
Do you know if any of the official FreeCAD tutorials go through using data planes instead of sketch on face?
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  It isn't really the right solution. Datum planes are usually unnecessary; cluttering up a design with a plane per sketch is certainly the wrong way to go about it. You can place each sketch with the same tools you place a datum plane -- by editing the attachment and attachment position. (You just can't do it at the point of creating the sketch in the same way as you can when creating a plane). You can then use expressions in those positions, including e.g. the width/depth/length of other objects (using the length of another Pad would be one very common scenario). Or you can use values from a Spreadsheet. And TNP won't always bite you anyway. It's possibly better to learn how to fix attachment issues than clutter up your design with datum planes. Learning how to place sketches in arbitrary space is so core to FreeCAD that it's probably worth going through the pain on this. Datum planes do have uses -- like when you want to attach large numbers of sketches to a single plane, or when you want to model some arbitrary plane without using physical geometry. They are also useful for e.g. cutting holes up to a face (because the plane can substitute for a face) They are also helpful, I find, when I am using an LCS for some feature. But quite often you see people trying to work around TNP with a datum plane, only to attach that plane to the same object that will have the TNP. This tutorial on attachment may help you (it's a bit involved) https://wiki.freecad.org/Basic_Attachment_Tutorial https://wiki.freecad.org/Basic_Attachment_Tutorial But the various Mango Jelly videos about sketch attachments are well worth watching.

serf 3y ago

I'm with you in the spirit of hurting Autodesk, but the FOSS alternatives, while able to produce a similar product, simply use different metaphors and concepts then F360/Inventor/etc do. It's not like the switch from WinRAR to 7-Zip, it's a long ordeal of the (possibly already overloaded) designer learning how to do everything over again. There is very little carry-over aside from general design knowledge; and it may take a very long time for that person to become productive in whatever they choose - which by that time their just-learned software package may be the new software package to hate. All I mean to express is that it takes a lot more than a money investment. F360 only remains dominant because -- pardon the expression -- they have a lot of us by the balls in some way. I'd love to break free, but those that pay for my design work will be hard-pressed to understand the sudden drop in productivity, the worse deliverables/renderings/the lessened compatibility with file types/the list goes on. It feels like the competitors need to cover some ground before a reasonable expectation can be made for the people that have to pay the bills with it to move over.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
I would also like to add that part of the value of Fusion 360 and similar packages is that they use either the Parasolid Kernel (developed by Siemens), or the ACIS Kernel (developed by Dassault Systemes), or a variant (I think AutoCAD has their own ACIS fork from long ago). If you use either of those kernels, you can handle incredibly complex geometry (or even just things that seem simple but aren't, like Fillets) with ease and good compatibility with other programs. Both of those kernels started development in the late 1980s. Parasolid alone claims over 350 3D Programs license their system. FreeCAD uses OpenCASCADE, because it's the only free option. You will notice that almost no other 3D Program, paid or free, uses it. OpenCASCADE is, compared to Parasolid or ACIS; buggy, broken, incomplete, unergonomic, and obsolete. There is almost no commercial software that uses it - they all find it better to license Parasolid or ACIS despite the heavy royalties those packages require. This puts FreeCAD in kind of a chicken-or-egg situation. The geometry kernel they use is considered unanimously inferior to the licensed kernels for almost every task, to the point that even people building new CAD programs (like the recent Plasticity beta) don't even consider it as an option. The 3D packages that license the kernels think that rebuilding ~35 years of work with extremely complex math equations requiring dozens, or even hundreds, of PhD-level math professors is too much work to justify not paying a license fee. To them, it's like saying we should rebuild Windows, but it's PhD-level math instead of APIs.

xvilka 3y ago

There is also a new competitor written in Lazarus/FPC - ZCAD[1]. Looks barebones for now, but nevertheless interesting. [1] https://github.com/zamtmn/zcad https://github.com/zamtmn/zcad

avhon1 3y ago
Looking through the features and issues, it looks like this is a 2D CAD program, like AutoCAD or LibreCAD, instead of a 3D parametric CAD program.
Blackthorn 3y ago
That's unfortunately closely named to zwcad/zw3d, which is a commercial product but extremely excellent.

paulclinger 3y ago

I recently came across CadZinho (https://github.com/zecruel/CadZinho https://github.com/zecruel/CadZinho), which is MIT-licensed, cross-platform (also works in a browser) and uses Lua as its extension language.