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Gave #FreeCAD a go last night. Given that I've not done any real CAD stuff for over a decade, I was expecting the confluence of 'CAD' and 'free software' to be a bizarre, arcane, and unintuitive experience. Very happy to report that it wasn't and, further, that FreeCAD is good.
(I'm putting Google Sketchup and Blender in the 'not CAD' category for your sake, dear purist reader).
Blender was never CAD.
It's animation software, first and foremost. :D
The process-flow for Blender needs a animators/film-makers mindset. :D
@BillySmith With enough plugins, Blender can be convinced to be anything it wants to be >:)
It has gotten a lot of love lately. Also, your previous CAD experience probably helped a ton. XD
@rl_dane I don't know, I had to remind myself what a 'fillet' is!
I think it's the small stuff I was most impressed by. Stuff automatically snapping in sensible ways, not having 20 different ways to select things, stuff hidden behind menus correctly instead of a UI like a 747 cockpit. Things that free software usually buggers up quite spectacularly.
@jsbarretto @rl_dane Yeah, it was a lot more like what you thought a couple of years ago, but there have been plenty of improvement lately!
@jwarlander @rl_dane I have a vague memory of trying it about 5 years ago and immediately bouncing off it in a matter of minutes, so well done to the developers on addressing that.
I tried FreeCAD a few times over the last 10+ years, and i could see how it was improving, but the 1.0 release has been great. :D
It's production-ready. :D
@jsbarretto I really need to give FreeCAD a try. I figured I was going to have to build from source or package it for @alpinelinux myself, but I just ran apk search freecad and to my pleasant surprise, there it is! 1.0.0 good?
@dalias @alpinelinux It seems to be! I don't really know what 'state of the art' is nowadays, but it feels like it can do everything SolidWorks could do circa 2012, so that's enough for me. Playing around with the constraint solver is very fun.