[mng2]

I guess I'm one of those people who tells my friends that KiCAD is "much better now". Bear in mind that this is a comparison to oh, five years ago, when it would crash roughly as often as OrCAD... EEs are accustomed to buggy tools that crash at inopportune moments, so to be clear, I think KiCAD is doing quite well.

I do stick to using it on Windows though. If the situation on the Mac is as bad as you say, perhaps they should drop their OSX claim until that gets fixed.

[decktech]

Even the link to the Windows version drops you in a folder on some random French server[1]. This looks like an exe that some random person built over a year ago. They should consider dropping all mentions of cross-platform compatibility until they're ready to release cross-platform software.

[1] http://iut-tice.ujf-grenoble.fr/cao/

[mng2]

I don't know what you're expecting (nightlies?) but KiCAD is a slow-moving project. Take a look at the old builds folder to get a rough idea of the interval between releases.

And that's not a random French server. KiCAD was originally started by a French researcher, and that's the site it's been distributed from for a long time. Only in the last few years has development shifted to a different location, but we haven't seen a whole lot of outward improvement.

I don't want to sounds like a fanboy; KiCAD clearly needs a lot of work on multiple fronts. But I've used it for moderately complex 2-6 layer projects and it's performed well enough for my purposes. If it's the Free Software angle you're interested in, there's always gEDA (which I have not used extensively).

[ChrisGammell]

Actually, that's the founder's server

[durkie]

they should drop their osx claim. i recently (2 months ago) fought kicad every step of the way in trying to get it installed and working on my mac, and i'm super comfortable with the shell and compiling from source and dealing with errors.

eventually i gave up and went to fritzing and got my parts done and sent to the fab in that same amount of time.