[NavinF]

Some blockers I've encountered after spending a lot of time in FreeCAD:

- No built-in assembly workbench. If you create more than 1 object, there is no way to align/attach them together. There are several competing, incompatible, and buggy plugins.

- Topological naming problem is way worse than in paid CAD software. It's very difficult to edit old constraints without breaking new actions as they're replayed: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Topological_naming_problem

- Software dependencies are not included. Essential features like viewing the dependency graph (to unbreak your model; See above) are broken out of the box. You have to manually install specific versions of tools like graphviz (no, not the same version used by all the other software on your system) to unbreak these features first. Same goes for rendering images, exporting to some formats, using some mesh generators, etc. You really get the full "linux desktop" experience even if you are not on linux ;)

[bsder]

> Topological naming problem is way worse than in paid CAD software. It's very difficult to edit old constraints without breaking new actions as they're replayed: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Topological_naming_problem

This is the single, number one, absolute must fix problem in FreeCAD. All other FreeCAD work should stop until this gets fixed. Period.

Broken constraints were bad enough, but as an amateur I could live with them. However, every now and then the system would renumber and reconnect constraints wrongly. That's just not acceptable and should never happen.

Until FreeCAD fixes this not only can't I recommend it but I have to give anti-recommendations to stay far, far away from it. That pains me greatly as FreeCAD is the only piece of open-source software I have ever had to chase people away from.

[blihp]

I agree that this is the biggest blocker, though I wouldn't go so far as to say stay away from it. Rather it is one of the most important things one needs to understand (trust me, you will after you've run into it a few times) when using this tool and design around it. Unfortunately, this limitation renders the tool far less powerful than it could be otherwise.

[NavinF]

> All other FreeCAD work should stop until this gets fixed. Period.

Ha ha that's exactly what would happen if FreeCAD was a company and had a product manager, but it's very unlikely that would happen organically.

Maybe some day a megacorp will get so pissed off by solidworks licensing that they fork FreeCAD, rewrite opencascade, fix the high priority bugs, and release code+binaries out of spite. A man can dream.

[amelius]

Why? We have several open source file-systems and if they started to corrupt your harddrive, people would run away from them.

[NavinF]

About that... https://danluu.com/filesystem-errors/

Things have gotten better, but filesystems still drop errors.