Oh, AutoDesk...you have such a way with words. Honestly, I would rather learn to design in OpenSCAD than send AutoDesk a single penny.
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Like others have said, Autodesk is a piece of shit company that continues to be customer hostile. They pulled the rug out from underneath users years ago with F360.
FreeCAD is a good alternative. A lot of people complain about the UI polish, and complain that models break. I'll admit that the UI isn't as polished as commercial software like F360 or SolidWorks. However, it's just as easy to break models in SolidWorks as it is in FreeCAD. I've been using 3D CAD for over 20 years, and it's always been a problem. Even with all of my experience, I still have to fix references that get broken as I make design changes. The more you use 3D CAD, the less you run into situations like this because you're able to think ahead and avoid them. Talk to any experienced CAD user and they'll tell you the same thing.
The workflows of FreeCAD are just like commercial software for most functions. There are definitely features that commercial software has that FreeCAD doesn't, but that's where you have to make the judgement about whether it's worth it to pay for it.
For me, I'll continue to use FreeCAD for my personal projects. I use SolidWorks at work, but we have different demands there, and it's worth the company paying the maintenance for it.
Just so nobody fires up freecad thinking they're about to get a commercial experience:
FreeCAD sucks. It works. But it sucks. There's basically no community. Development is fractured and slow. Some workflows that are trivial in solid works are tedious in freecad.
But it works. And it's foss. If you need something that runs on Linux, it's the way to go.
I use FreeCAD exclusively, and while it does have several aspects about it that still suck, I have to say that it's has improved dramatically by the current release (0.21.1, I think) versus when I started using it which was around 0.18.
I have definitely found the workflow for certain operations to be a bit obtuse, but I've never actually had it been unable to do whatever I was trying to accomplish, ultimately, somehow in some way.
I'll take FreeCAD's quirks and foibles over any type of predatory subscription, licensing, or cloud only bullshit AutoDesk or Solidworks or whoever the hell else is up to. Any day, any time.
I also started using it around that time. And I agree with everything you said except the part where said it's improved dramatically. It's improved, yes, but I would call those improvements minimal, not dramatic, especially considering it's taken five years to accomplish them.
I don't know, I think the tree dependency fix in 0.2 was pretty huge. The rest of the stuff I can pretty much take or leave, including all the new toolbar icons which wasted who knows how many man-hours that probably could have been better spent elsewhere... But not having all my parts bork themselves because god forbid I modified a feature at the top of the tree rather than the bottom made using FreeCAD go from exhausting to use to actually properly functional -- at least for me.
Disagree. I thought freecad was awesome. But I didn't use it professionally...just as a hobbyist teaching myself cad.
The most frustrating thing for me was the changes between versions and finding the right tutorial to match your version was frustrating.
It's the equivalent of gimp vs Photoshop.
This is my experience too. It's like people repeating 20 years of Gimp vs Photoshop.