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I love free software. However I'm still kinda doubting... should I want to take a commercial job, aren't we expected to use Solidworks or something? But yeah,

• exasperaited 10mo ago
  I am no expert but my take on this is: FreeCAD is obviously not a commercial grade CAD package, but it’s not because it is weak conceptually: it’s not dissimilar to Solidworks, Onshape or Fusion. It’s weak in terms of UI flow and its CAD kernel is flawed in some ways (as you probably already know: fillets, chamfers, drafts, thicknesses/shells). I don’t believe there is so much to learn to get from FreeCAD to one of those packages, at least where core concepts are concerned, so I carry on with what I am doing. But on the other hand I think one learns a concept best from multiple perspectives, and all of them, essentially, have a free, student or cheap (e.g. Solidworks For Makers) tier, so probably the answer for us is to do some learning in one or two of those alongside. There is a good video on YouTube by Deltahedra where he does a Solidworks certification exam using FreeCAD, incidentally.
  • bartvk 10mo ago
    I didn't know about Solidworks for Makers, thanks so much for the tip. Watching the Deltahedra video right now, pretty interesting.