If you are looking for FOSS CAD, then FreeCAD 1.0 is about the only game in town. SolveSpace is fine for fairly simple uses but lacks all the advanced toys one might like. Nor has it been updated in 3 years now. Siemans SolidEdge has a free community edition, but it’s Widows only. OnShape is is a popular alternative to Fusion, and is fully cloud based, but it is restricted like Fusion.
As an acolyte that wears the sackcloth and ashes of FreeCAD, there is a growing community of tutorials, (I highly recommend MangoJelly on youtube) for beginners to learn with. But the learning curve can be steep as you get past the basics. There is a FreeCAD community here, but it’s small and not very active. Sadly the best place for answers remains on reddit.
Jezza@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’ve spent the better half of six months trying to answer this question. (not continuously, just passively)
For some background, I used fusion 360 for a number of years, so I witnessed it turn to absolute shit, but that means parametric CADs are my cup of tea.
Here’s my thoughts.
FreeCAD: I tried this, but I’ll admit I gave up quickly.
It doesn’t feel like a complete solution. It feels like more and more tools have been tacked on without the realisation that people who haven’t been using it for years are going to have even less of an idea of where to start.
I do want to come back and give it another shot, as it hit 1.0 recently.
Plasticity:
I was originally interested in it because if how easy it could be to model something. After having used it for a number of days, I agree that it’s relatively intuitive to get something going, but it lacks the precise feeling of a parametric CAD. Don’t get me wrong, you can be precise with it, but it feels something akin to a 3D paint and less like a CAD program.
I can imagine if you just want to do something small, it would be sufficient.
OpenSCAD: I’ve been a programmer for 15+ years, and I expected to like this.
Sadly, if you lack a strong maths background, you’ll find this difficult to master.
I’ll be the first to admit my maths isn’t as great as it used to be.
The beauty of a parametric CAD is that I don’t need to know how to position everything exactly, I can just give it the constraints and it manages it for me.
With this, it felt like I kept on testing a value, measuring the resulting dimension that I was trying to go for, tweaking it again, rise and repeat.
Didn’t feel like I was programming, it felt like I was writing the 3D model itself with a DSL.
The lack of fillets and chamfers was also frustrating.
And this brings me to my current recommendation:
SolveSpace:
I’ve been using it for about a month now, and I’ve been happy with it.
It didn’t take much to understand what it’s trying to do.
It’s completely parametric and I felt at home pretty quickly.
You can do fillets and chamfers easily, it just requires a bit of creative work.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
I’d be happy to answer them.
jbd@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Try blender. I use it for CAD.
Ziglin@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It really isn’t made for that anymore but I too find myself using it for CAD occasionally too.
beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the 1.0 of freecad.
I don’t use CAD professionally, and even my hobby usage is less than it was, and it was only a dozen or two small projects.
I had never used freecad, always fusion 360. I’ve been away for awhile, and also switched to Linux in the meantime. I needed to make a simple object, and tried freecad 1.0, and I literally could not intuit how to begin. Not a single shape, I was so lost, it was very frustrating.
I tried onshape and got a bit further, but still don’t like the corporate nature of it.
I’m not trying to slam freecad, I really want it to work, and when I have more time to sit down and study it, I want to try again. But in the meantime I went back to fusion 360 in a VM, which was very sluggish, but at least I knew where everything was.