Oh, AutoDesk…you have such a way with words. Honestly, I would rather learn to design in OpenSCAD than send AutoDesk a single penny.
Oh, AutoDesk…you have such a way with words. Honestly, I would rather learn to design in OpenSCAD than send AutoDesk a single penny.
Like others have said, Autodesk is a piece of shit company that continues to be customer hostile. They pulled the rug out from underneath users years ago with F360.
FreeCAD is a good alternative. A lot of people complain about the UI polish, and complain that models break. I’ll admit that the UI isn’t as polished as commercial software like F360 or SolidWorks. However, it’s just as easy to break models in SolidWorks as it is in FreeCAD. I’ve been using 3D CAD for over 20 years, and it’s always been a problem. Even with all of my experience, I still have to fix references that get broken as I make design changes. The more you use 3D CAD, the less you run into situations like this because you’re able to think ahead and avoid them. Talk to any experienced CAD user and they’ll tell you the same thing.
The workflows of FreeCAD are just like commercial software for most functions. There are definitely features that commercial software has that FreeCAD doesn’t, but that’s where you have to make the judgement about whether it’s worth it to pay for it.
For me, I’ll continue to use FreeCAD for my personal projects. I use SolidWorks at work, but we have different demands there, and it’s worth the company paying the maintenance for it.
Just so nobody fires up freecad thinking they’re about to get a commercial experience:
FreeCAD sucks. It works. But it sucks. There’s basically no community. Development is fractured and slow. Some workflows that are trivial in solid works are tedious in freecad.
But it works. And it’s foss. If you need something that runs on Linux, it’s the way to go.
Disagree. I thought freecad was awesome. But I didn’t use it professionally…just as a hobbyist teaching myself cad.
The most frustrating thing for me was the changes between versions and finding the right tutorial to match your version was frustrating.
It’s the equivalent of gimp vs Photoshop.
This is my experience too. It’s like people repeating 20 years of Gimp vs Photoshop.
Onshape is another alternative. Even runs on Linux too!
While you are not wrong, I personally wouldn’t consider it unless there was a “buy it for a fixed price option”. Subscription only unless it’s for personal use. Oh and it is Cloud only