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Comment on PSA: Try FreeCAD Link Branch (it's a big improvement!)

FreeCAD could do with a massive UX overhaul and a workflow that people could use without having to relearn how to invent the wheel. The underpinnings of the software are good. They’ve done a lot of good work there. But as far as a usable piece of software, something like Blender – with a lot more complexity, and a lot more individual toolsets (2D Animation, Video Editing, VFX, Sculpting, Poly Modeling, Bone Rigging, Scripting – ALL with entire workflows associated with them) – has managed to be a wildly usable solution despite many of its individual subsystems working together.

FreeCAD suffers from the lack of proper workflow immensely, and will hamper its adoption unless the maintainers take a far more pragmatic approach to their development. They need to take this more serious, as more usage drives more funding, which drives better development. You can’t just go “It’s open source, YOLO, fuck you if you don’t like how we do things”. Because you’re just going to flounder as a long-lived project, but never a successful one.

I complain about FreeCAD because I want it to get better. I go back to it every year at least once, just to see if they’ve opened their eyes or not. I have used everything from Siemens Solid Edge, to Inventor, to Solidworks, Fusion360, OnShape, Blender, Rhino, hell – EVEN SOLVESPACE is easier to use than FreeCAD and it’s only a solver…

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u_tamtam@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

individual toolsets (2D Animation, Video Editing, VFX, Sculpting, Poly Modeling, Bone Rigging, Scripting – ALL with entire workflows associated with them) – has managed to be a wildly usable solution despite many of its individual subsystems working together.

Yup, I believe this boils down to good project management, someone has to steer those individual components so they work together better, in a cohesive manner, to make the result more than the sum its the parts. This is especially difficult in an opensource context where different contributors have different interests, and I think Blender, having managed that much, is an example to follow.

And I agree with everything you wrote, I don’t expect FreeCAD to get there in a reasonable timeframe unless it gets serious funding and expertise brought in.

Plasticity is a good project to follow, I don’t think they are comparable nor intended for the same audience, but there are product design aspects to learn from it, definitely :)

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