this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
39 points (100.0% liked)
Opensource
1964 readers
8 users here now
A community for discussion about open source software! Ask questions, share knowledge, share news, or post interesting stuff related to it!
⠀
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Have they ever fixed the usability issues? I tried it like 5 years ago and it was pretty terrible. Not as bad as gEDA or Eagle but still, worse than DesignSpark PCB for example, and the people that wrote that thought warping your mouse was a reasonable thing to do.
Eventually I found Horizon EDA which is basically the Kicad engine with a mostly fixed UX (it still has some quirks). But that's pretty much a one man project so it would be nice if Kicad actually improved.
A while back I was looking for a FOSS EDA and saw overwhelming support for Kicad, but some people reluctantly supported it exactly due to poor UX/UI. I was looking for something easy to pick up and I stumbled on LibrePCB and they are very user friendly to me. If you need particularly advanced features or depend on large existing libraries it may not be for you but for smaller hobby projects I think it's great.
Perhaps worth a shot?
In December they pushed a pretty big update with many new features: https://librepcb.org/blog/2024-12-01_release_1.2.0/
Ah yeah LibrePCB is the only one I haven't tried actually. I guess I was put off by the name - I've found that projects that focus on geeky freedom tend to not care at all about UX, but it sounds like that isn't the case here so I'll definitely give it a shot, thanks!