Recently I’ve been having feelings about moving away from Fusion 360. The combination of cloud app / filesystem and their demonstrated willingness to remove features and add arbitrary limitations (eg. 10 editable model limit) makes me feel uneasy about using it. To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it. If you’ve ever rented a house you’ll know the feeling - you quite don’t feel like it’s really your home, if the landlord wants to make renovate or redecorate you don’t have any choice and you could be evicted at any moment.
So I tried FreeCAD. At first, I have to say that it felt a little like stepping out of a spaceship (Fusion) and banging rocks together like a caveman. It’s not that you can’t do (most) of the same things as an enterprise CAD package, but the killer feature of Fusion is the level of intuitiveness and “it just works” that makes FreeCAD seem like trying to write Latin.
After a week of on-and-off learning I was not sure I wanted to continue. Even after getting comfortable with the basics, frustration levels would spike to 11 sometimes. The main issue I kept running into was that altering a previous feature would break everything that came after, requiring a varying amount of work to fix. The FreeCAD wiki suggests ways to mitigate this but many of them are un-intuitive and/or inconvenient. After some googling this seems to be caused by a pretty difficult to solve issue called the “Topological Naming Problem” (where FreeCAD can’t keep track of surfaces / edges / vertexes in a stable fashion when features are changed). Then I came across this blog post that pointed out a fix has actually been developed earlier this year. A developer by the name of RealThunder has created a fork of FreeCAD called “Link Branch” which can track topology in a (more) stable fashion.
I tried this branch and was blown away by how much more usable it is. Not only can it handle changes to past features almost perfectly, but I can create multiple bodies from a single sketch (not possible before) and there are other UI tweaks that make creating features easier such as the ability to preview fillets and chamfers at the same time as selecting their edges. I’m not totally sure which of these features are unique to Link branch vs which might be pre-release in the main branch, but certainly the topology naming fix is unique to Link.
So if you have tried FreeCAD in the past and been frustrated, or if Fusion’s past free license changes or price increases are making you uneasy, give the Link Branch a try! Downloads are available in the releases page.
Isn’t it wild that all the FORKS of FreeCAD somehow manage to have better versions? FreeCAD is OVER 20 YEARS OLD.
How is it still such a piece of shit software? Because the maintainers are garbage. It has nothing to do with the topology problem, it has to do with workflow, and FreeCAD lacks it almost completely.
Edit: Ohhh, this is realthunder’s fork! Glad to see he’s continuing on it, but yeah - I think by now most FreeCAD users had known/switched over to his version anyhow.
I didn’t know about and was one of the reasons I was not using free as. Now I’ll have to try it again.
I didn’t know, either.
You sound like an ungrateful brat!
They sound like a realist. If every branch has a better version than main, then what are you doing with the master branch in the first place? There are a lot of glaring issues with the software. It spent so much time in development already, it should’ve been a second Solidworks by now. Instead you get a mess that breaks all the time.
Well you also don’t understand community projects apparently. It’s software made by mostly (or only?) unpaid volunteers. You can’t expect anything from it. Everything you get is a fucking present that you should be grateful for. If you don’t like it, go and pay for a commercial solution. Better even help out the project by reporting bugs, usability issues, writing docs or code.
For now FreeCAD is the best FLOSS CAD around and only a strong community will make it better. Naysayers like you and @thantik can go shut up, you don’t create anything of value by complaining. I agree that FreeCAD has many issues. The important part is that it’s getting better with every release and the releases keep on coming regularly.
I’ve used Blender 20 years ago and it was in a veeery different shape than today, but it was amazingly well managed and has developed into a beautiful piece of software rivaling even the most expensive commercial packages in many respects. I predict this to happen for FreeCAD as well. When I first installed it some ten years ago, I couldn’t even get it to make cube. Now I have yet to find a 3d printing project that I couldn’t do with it. Keeping in mind that Blender’s development started 1994, ie. roughly 30 years ago, we’d need to wait another 10 years for FreeCAD to be as good as Blender in its respective domain.