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by m-ee 2076 days ago
This is a very software view of things. You’d be hard pressed to get by with whatever the FOSS equivalents of CAD/EDA software are.
3 comments

I do professional electronics design and some mechanical design. I use 100% FLOSS tools. KiCAD nightly is currently slightly less buggy than the closed crap, and about as capable. The major difference is that bugs I report get fixed within days, which I've never experienced with any of the commercial offerings. I use stable KiCAD for most projects, and nightly for things that need advanced functionality. It's absolutely excellent. The mechanical design story is not as great, but FreeCAD is improving at a decent pace and now that Fusion is crippleware a lot of people are looking into FreeCAD, and complaining about how it works, and some are contributing and improving it. KiCAD went through this cycle due to a large influx of Eagle users when Eagle got eaten by the beast, and came out dramatically, shockingly improved. If the same thing happens to FreeCAD in the next few years I doubt we'll have any excuse to go back. So I don't feel "hard pressed to get by" - I feel more productive than before I switched to FLOSS tools.
It’s been years since I’ve tried KiCad but this is the second time someone’s told me it’s come a long way. Sounds like I should give it another try
This is very correct. And this is specific to professional use cases. Hobbyists can get by with FOSS tools.
how about KiCad as replacement for EDA? for CAD, yeah, that is really the last thing to be ported to linux afaik