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I've switched 100% my of my hobbist design work onto FreeCAD since last year. It's still kind of painful, but I didn't feel limited. I'm waiting for it to have his "blender" moment. It's still far behind, yes, and it still does tend to crap over geometry a little too much, however I don't have to deal with licensing BS, and by knowing python I can actually do way more than what I could do with other cad offerings. The potential is absolutely staggering there. For reference, I was mostly using onshape+f360 before for my personal work, but my experience includes inventor, solidedge, solidworks and creo. I work close to an HW team, but my employer is stingy to give cad licenses to anybody which doesn't strictly need it due to the outrageous costs these software costs for every single seat. This makes collaboration a ROYAL pain. So my workflow usually involves importing parts into freecad, reverse engineer them, and then send the actual modeled suggestion back to the HW team. I can work with a good 30% of the parts involved without too much trouble, which is pretty amazing in it's own regard, although it's usually not pretty. I really wanted to buy Alibre. I can afford the full "alibre design offline license" no problem. It's the only cad program I've seen that has decent pricing and decent licensing, but it doesn't work on linux. And I tried everything to make it work on wine. Hard pass. In a certain sense, I'm glad I've stuck with freecad recently, since I know every single design I do I will not have to fight with licensing or obsolete window incompatibilities later on. It's mine forever. |