[throw46365]

FreeCAD isn't perfect obviously (but neither IMO is the situation with any 'gratis' tier of commercial CAD). You pays your no money and you takes your complicated choice.

Rules for FreeCAD fillet and chamfers:

- In OpenCascade, dress-up operations like fillets and chamfers unfortunately can't wholly consume existing edges; this explains almost all the reasons why they fail.

- So if it's only dress-up, presentational stuff, do it last, or as late as you can in any given part

- If a fillet or chamfer is structural or fundamental, consider adding it to the sketch (there are constraint-preserving fillet tools, and now in 0.22-dev/future 1.0 the same is true for chamfers)

- If you need to fillet or chamfer generated geometry, consider how you might add it/cut it out with sweeps or grooves.

This is a bit of a pain, but it's nowhere near as much of a pain as trying to do them in OpenSCAD!

[eropple]

FreeCAD does a better job of it than OpenSCAD does, yes. ;) Agreed on all points; the reason why the rules you describe are the way they are make sense to me, and I could use FreeCAD if I had to. But I pay for Fusion because it's worth it to me.

[throw46365]

Yeah. I've always been of the opinion that, having got myself from OpenSCAD to GUI CAD, I will jump from FreeCAD to onShape/Fusion360 if I feel I have to -- or do my CAD work on a Windows machine with Alibre.

I feel fairly at home on FreeCAD and some of the recent improvements and developments just make it even better. Plus there's a lot of actually good tutorial material on Youtube now. So for now I am happy not to jump.

(I do tend to make this decision individually for each software application, though; I'm unwilling to limit myself to GIMP when there are other alternatives to Photoshop. But I might well be willing to stick to Inkscape.)