Ondel has a nicer user interface, but I personally use and recommend realthunder’s LinkStable branch of FreeCAD. Mainline FreeCAD (and by extension, Ondsel) suffer from the topological naming problem, which can be especially jarring to users coming from proprietary CAD software. realthunder put a lot of work into a solution that handles the problem pretty well, so I’m using his fork until toponaming gets mainlined.
Comment on So glad I'm ditching these fucking idiots
einlander@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Give Ondsel a try. It’s a freecad fork. ondsel.com
KingRandomGuy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Chreutz@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Didn’t ondsel implement a fix for toponaming as well?
skilltheamps@feddit.de 4 months ago
As far as I remember ondsel is working on upstreaming realthunder’s approach to freecad, but it is a lot of work to polish up because it touches so many parts of the application.
Here is a nice interview with one cofounder of ondsel where I have this information from: shows.acast.com/…/ep-12-brad-cto-of-ondsel
KingRandomGuy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Last I tried it, there was no fix. Their latest update on the website says:
The work on the toponaming problem is an ongoing project, and we are very grateful to the FreeCAD community for contributing a lot to that effort. But it’s not complete yet, there will be much more to say when it’s largely done. So let’s focus on the other three.
So I take it they haven’t implemented a fix. They previously said they were going to work with the FreeCAD team on mainlining a toponaming fix, using realthunder’s work as a proof of concept, but said fix has not landed in mainline FreeCAD yet. I believe that’s the major feature they’re looking to implement for FreeCAD 1.0.
Definitely excited for Ondsel though! Hopefully that fix can be integrated quickly.
asbestos@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This looks interesting. In your opinion, does it improve on FreeCAD much? I tried FreeCAD some time ago and I felt like an absolute moron
einlander@lemmy.world 4 months ago
At this point it’s a just a fork of freecad with a slight ui overhaul and some usability improvements. It’s still freecad underneath. Ondsels product is their freecad compatible collaborative cloud. They have made some changes to the workers to simply them and are contributing it back to main freecad. But the learning curve is still there. The bugs on Windows that can crash your projects still occur. But you can use wsl to install the Linux version and not have any issues.
skilltheamps@feddit.de 4 months ago
It is not a fork aiming to replace it. It is rather a spin with saner defaults to cater to companies as customers. The product which shall carry ondsel financially is their freecad compatible cloud offering, and the hope is to use that for elevating freecad itself too. They need their spin to be able to ship an ootb experience fitting their motive and brand. So if you would like a less confusing experience it might be something for you. Currently there’s a lot of borderline deprecated and also redundant functionality in freecad, so I hope that ondsel’s cleanup mantra will make it to the ootp upstream experience as well.
KingRandomGuy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
One of the big changes in my opinion is the addition of a “Smart Dimension” tool where the system interprets and previews the constraint that you want to apply instead of requiring you to pick the specific constraint ahead of time(almost identical to SOLIDWORKS), and the ability to add constraints such as length while drawing out shapes (like Autodesk Inventor, probably also Fusion but I haven’t used that). It makes the sketcher workflow more like other CAD programs and requires a little less manual work with constraints.
JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 4 months ago
They have been around for a year and are already in the habit of missing deadlines and missing timelines laid out.
ondsel.com/…/the-road-to-freecad-1-0-is-shorter-t…
I said it back when this came out, but they assured me that they were “well on track” even their to-do list was 2x as long as their in progress and completed combined lol.
I think it will still be a long time before things are upstreamed and ready to go
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 4 months ago
Why?
DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com 4 months ago
Thanks for this - I think I remember reading about Ondsel recently (used to design a toilet roll holder key, so they could replenish toilet paper at FOSDEM?). I’ll give it a look. Cheers!
venoft@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Ah FINALLY there is a good fork. FreeCAD exists now for like 15 years, but almost no one uses it because the ui absolutely sucks. And the worst part is, the maintainers know it but they refuse to change it because they think they’re geniuses and everyone else should conform to their twisted vision of cad ui instead of following the standard of literally every other cad program out there.
KingRandomGuy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
IMO the bigger problem with FreeCAD is the topological naming problem. It’s very easy to get frustrated because your model broke due to a change you made in an earlier feature.
The UI isn’t amazing though, and that unfortunately happens quite a bit with open source software. Hopefully it’ll go the way of Blender and KiCAD with an eventual major release that overhauls the UI.
drphungky@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yeah, coming in with no prior CAD experience I actually think freecad’s interface makes sense, especially since I’ve used it for both 3d printing (one workbench) and mocking up building plans (a different lumber one I was able to download as an add-on - very cool).
I did run into the topological naming problem once though, and I’m far from a power user, so I’ve been meaning to check out the real thunder fork.
RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I keep bashing my head against the horrible UI way more as a beginner. Just as I manage to bring the million toolbars into a reasonable arrangement, I switch workspaces and then they’re all messed up again. I couldn’t care less about the topological naming problem right now
KingRandomGuy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Hmm, that actually sounds like a bug. I haven’t seen that on my end (once I set the locations of options in my toolbars they stay there, even after restarts). You may want to report that on their issue tracker.