this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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3DPrinting

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Oh, AutoDesk...you have such a way with words. Honestly, I would rather learn to design in OpenSCAD than send AutoDesk a single penny.

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[–] [email protected] 161 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I greatly miss the ability to simply purchase a program on a disk for a given year and just have access to that tool.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (3 children)

otoh you have stuff like FreeCAD or OpenSCAD completely free and usable AND you could modify it as you please.

Back then FOSS CAD was barely usable.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the thing people wish for was a little bit of polish in their open source tools.

I love kicad, but it used to have some really rough edges in spite of being simpler compared to something like Altium.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve used FreeCAD for a few months for small/medium-sized projects and it crashes way too often. It’s pretty much unusable for me. I only use it for CAM these days and do my CAD with OnShape.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I'm learning freecad now and can verify the crashiness, so far I've been learning the tools to avoid and having some luck

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Freecad is... rough. But, it has python API, and that's what I ended up using for almost all my stuff (there also was a period of using cadquery, but installing it is a horrible pain, so I gve up).

Also using onshape every now and then, but many things are just too annoying to do with a gui.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

They exist, but you have to look harder. And they often cost a lot more too