[fainpul]

Well said. It seems to me, many FOSS projects suffer from long time contributors which are extremely conservative and don't like any kind of change. Hence every new or improved feature becomes merely a setting (which barely anybody will discover) which is not enabled by default. The UX does only worsen this way because old cruft coexists with its replacement, settings grow fast, the combinatorial explosion of all feature combinations produces tons of bugs and new users will always be turned off by the first use experience.

To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed, which is somewhat incompatible with unpaid open source development. I think this video about Audacity's redesign is informative in this regard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38

[freeopinion]

Please be careful about voicing generic complaints in a discussion of a specific product. IMO, FreeCAD 1.0 took some huge leaps in ergonomics. I was surprised about how much work had been done. The workers behind FreeCAD don't deserve lazy sniping that doesn't even apply to their creation.

My guess is that they might appreciate specific criticism. It would probably help focus the work they are doing. But don't generalize them to have all the usual problems everybody else always seems to have. That isn't very helpful to anybody.

[fainpul]

But I mean it. In my opinion, all the criticism of my post also applies to FreeCAD, not just other projects. Look what brought this up: a hidden feature someone wanted but wasn't aware of.

I'm not trying to blame anyone. I think this is a structural problem with FOSS projects in general (and it also applies to FreeCAD specifically).

[sho_hn]

I think freeopinion is right, though. I don't think "Make internals" is off by default only because the developers are conservative, but because the meaning and behavior of it changed a few times recently around the merger of the RealThunder forks and the TNP work. I did a casual search and 2025 comments are full of it doing nothing.

So a more productive specific thing would perhaps be indeed to strike up a "It seems to work nicely now, why isn't it default?" convo and maybe figure out the remaining bugs.

[fainpul]

> So a more productive specific thing would perhaps be indeed to strike up a "It seems to work nicely now, why isn't it default?"

That may be. It's just not what I'm interested in. I don't have the energy to fight lots of little battles to improve some minor things, when – in my perception – the end result would still *suck. I think a major rework is needed. For example, I don't think simply enabling "Make Internals" would be the best thing to do. IMO it should be always on AND the setting should be removed AND the toggle from the data view should be removed AND that would imply that it must always work bugfree so that nobody has a need to disable it. I don't think this is ever gonna happen if I start a discussion or even make a pull request.

* I'm not a hater, I'm a FreeCAD user. Out of all the offerings that exist, it's my preferred CAD tool for my private hobby use. I just wish it was better, because I see untapped potential.

[skydhash]

> To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed,

FOSS is a doer-cracy. If you have a pain point, patch it, and it will go away.

[fainpul]

It seems like you've only read this half-sentence before replying.

What you say is part of the problem. It leads to "patchwork software" without a clear vision.

[skydhash]

Vision is overrated if it’s not solving users’ problems. Software with a vision is kinda the bane of the industry right now (macos tahoe, copilot, windows 11,…)

[the__alchemist]

I find the experience not to be as straightforward as you imply, forking aside.