Depends on your needs. I probably wouldn’t consider it good enough yet for commercial but the improvements on 1.0 take care of pretty much all of my needs. The “free” licenses for Fusion360 and OnShape are garbage and feel like nothing more than attempts to get hobbyists and small businesses locked in before changing terms. Plus, last I checked, they pull the same kinda data vacuum bullshit that social media companies did in their terms - “free” license holders should expect any and all of their work to be resold by the companies for profit.
But we are talking about a commercial level here - Adobe Photoshop is primarily a professional software that is also used by prosumers/hobbyists,not vice versa.
We all judge e.g. Affinity on that level (rightfully).
And seen from that level FreeCAD is,well, what I said. Sure,it might do for some hobbyists and even some small companies, but even then it shows it’s massive structural flaws. Which partly, and this is why I am so openly critical of it, exist for 5+ years and are there due to the ongoing infighting in the development community.
The problem with is roughness is also a problem in terms of commercial use. When I do things as a hobbyist it’s just my time that is consumed. Not ideal,but it is what it is.
In a commercial setting my staff takes more time due to this roughness and that costs money - much more money than commercial solutions cost. Which is bad - especially as it forces people to stick with Windows as there are no properly working alternatives on Linux.
And yes, onshape and fusion are horrible to hobbyists in that regard, but Solidedge(free) and to some extend Solidworks(cheap) are decent.
I have to agree with pretty much everything that you’ve said there. Since I don’t use CAD professionally, and I’m not about to suffer through the windows experience voluntarily, I’m pretty much such with FreeCAD and (when I get around to it) CADquery. Hopefully more companies will start supporting Linux and free CAD devs from all the MS fuckery - might even get FreeCAD (or a fork) to be more productive and prioritize things necessary to be competitive for SMB/hobbyists.
Yeah, it’s a real pain, sadly.
Tbh, I don’t think we will ever find a major CAD company support Linux again - even Siemens, who supported NX on Linux for ages have stopped.
From my POV we have two choices: Either we make FreeCAD a viable alternative that beats the competition or at least is on the same page as them - which I find highly unlikely with the current system, so a fork+someone who finances it would be needed- or we find ways to optimise/enable Windows based CAD on Linux*. The former worked for the other tool we regularly use: QGIS. That has become the de facto standard in a lot of fields and has sometimes even pushed out commercial competition.
The later is imho the better way for CAD as it is really really hard for companies to change their CAD (even within windows and with a commercial product) - I have a business estimate for an medical product company who estimated 30k € per employee under ideal conditions, possibly more if something goes wrong(Training, loss of production, licencing, converting of files, integration of external databases,etc.).
We have done it for games (tbf,with a lot of help from valve) and surely can do it with CAD (which in theory should be easier).
The last option is a bad one: In theory we could use FreeCAD as a backengine and develop themes that replicate the workflow of other products. But for that FreeCAD would need to improve on so many points beforehand…
Photoshop is a professional level software that is used by hobbyists as well - we compare affinity to this level as well and that’s okay.
So we should compare FreeCAD on this level as well. And from that perspective it’s sadly exactly what I called it.
The roughness from a commercial perspective is an issue as it costs money - because it takes people much more time to do things,even when they work.
And there are still way too many issues with it that sometimes are a result of infighting within the development community and exist for5+ years. To name a few:
More complex imports are basically a nightmare especially with more complex facets
Large file handling is unstable as f***. Our CAD files are commercial building size or “complex medical product” sized and despite having more than enough resources allocated FreeCAD crashes frequently without even proving any hints to the user why. The issue behind it is known for years, though.
We had multiple issues with using older files that were saved on different OSes - really great if you can’t access files that are 16 months old. Also a known issue.
Standardised rollout is still basically impossible.
Just to name a few… It’s simply not on the level even Solidworks has in that regards (which has it’s own issues,yes, I am on the same page with you there). While I don’t really like Siemens NC (or Solidedge for that matter) it’s indeed a reasonably good software - but me disliking them might be the result of them dropping Linux support more or less unannounced. AutoCAD and it’s sister products are imho worse than Creo,but again: More of a personal thing.
In the end they sadly (!) beat FreeCAD in all aspects. By far.
Which is pretty much a catastrophe as FreeCAD is the only Linux alternative atm.
Sadly FreeCAD is absolutely shit compared to what commercial CAD products offer - and sadly even 1.0 didn’t change their problems.
Depends on your needs. I probably wouldn’t consider it good enough yet for commercial but the improvements on 1.0 take care of pretty much all of my needs. The “free” licenses for Fusion360 and OnShape are garbage and feel like nothing more than attempts to get hobbyists and small businesses locked in before changing terms. Plus, last I checked, they pull the same kinda data vacuum bullshit that social media companies did in their terms - “free” license holders should expect any and all of their work to be resold by the companies for profit.
But we are talking about a commercial level here - Adobe Photoshop is primarily a professional software that is also used by prosumers/hobbyists,not vice versa. We all judge e.g. Affinity on that level (rightfully).
And seen from that level FreeCAD is,well, what I said. Sure,it might do for some hobbyists and even some small companies, but even then it shows it’s massive structural flaws. Which partly, and this is why I am so openly critical of it, exist for 5+ years and are there due to the ongoing infighting in the development community.
The problem with is roughness is also a problem in terms of commercial use. When I do things as a hobbyist it’s just my time that is consumed. Not ideal,but it is what it is. In a commercial setting my staff takes more time due to this roughness and that costs money - much more money than commercial solutions cost. Which is bad - especially as it forces people to stick with Windows as there are no properly working alternatives on Linux.
And yes, onshape and fusion are horrible to hobbyists in that regard, but Solidedge(free) and to some extend Solidworks(cheap) are decent.
I have to agree with pretty much everything that you’ve said there. Since I don’t use CAD professionally, and I’m not about to suffer through the windows experience voluntarily, I’m pretty much such with FreeCAD and (when I get around to it) CADquery. Hopefully more companies will start supporting Linux and free CAD devs from all the MS fuckery - might even get FreeCAD (or a fork) to be more productive and prioritize things necessary to be competitive for SMB/hobbyists.
Yeah, it’s a real pain, sadly. Tbh, I don’t think we will ever find a major CAD company support Linux again - even Siemens, who supported NX on Linux for ages have stopped.
From my POV we have two choices: Either we make FreeCAD a viable alternative that beats the competition or at least is on the same page as them - which I find highly unlikely with the current system, so a fork+someone who finances it would be needed- or we find ways to optimise/enable Windows based CAD on Linux*. The former worked for the other tool we regularly use: QGIS. That has become the de facto standard in a lot of fields and has sometimes even pushed out commercial competition.
The later is imho the better way for CAD as it is really really hard for companies to change their CAD (even within windows and with a commercial product) - I have a business estimate for an medical product company who estimated 30k € per employee under ideal conditions, possibly more if something goes wrong(Training, loss of production, licencing, converting of files, integration of external databases,etc.). We have done it for games (tbf,with a lot of help from valve) and surely can do it with CAD (which in theory should be easier).
The last option is a bad one: In theory we could use FreeCAD as a backengine and develop themes that replicate the workflow of other products. But for that FreeCAD would need to improve on so many points beforehand…
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Photoshop is a professional level software that is used by hobbyists as well - we compare affinity to this level as well and that’s okay.
So we should compare FreeCAD on this level as well. And from that perspective it’s sadly exactly what I called it.
The roughness from a commercial perspective is an issue as it costs money - because it takes people much more time to do things,even when they work.
And there are still way too many issues with it that sometimes are a result of infighting within the development community and exist for5+ years. To name a few:
More complex imports are basically a nightmare especially with more complex facets
Large file handling is unstable as f***. Our CAD files are commercial building size or “complex medical product” sized and despite having more than enough resources allocated FreeCAD crashes frequently without even proving any hints to the user why. The issue behind it is known for years, though.
We had multiple issues with using older files that were saved on different OSes - really great if you can’t access files that are 16 months old. Also a known issue.
Standardised rollout is still basically impossible.
Just to name a few… It’s simply not on the level even Solidworks has in that regards (which has it’s own issues,yes, I am on the same page with you there). While I don’t really like Siemens NC (or Solidedge for that matter) it’s indeed a reasonably good software - but me disliking them might be the result of them dropping Linux support more or less unannounced. AutoCAD and it’s sister products are imho worse than Creo,but again: More of a personal thing. In the end they sadly (!) beat FreeCAD in all aspects. By far. Which is pretty much a catastrophe as FreeCAD is the only Linux alternative atm.
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