Oh, AutoDesk…you have such a way with words. Honestly, I would rather learn to design in OpenSCAD than send AutoDesk a single penny.

  • Ace0fBlades@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    158
    ·
    1 year ago

    I greatly miss the ability to simply purchase a program on a disk for a given year and just have access to that tool.

    • heeplr@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      63
      ·
      1 year ago

      otoh you have stuff like FreeCAD or OpenSCAD completely free and usable AND you could modify it as you please.

      Back then FOSS CAD was barely usable.

      • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        41
        ·
        1 year ago

        I think the thing people wish for was a little bit of polish in their open source tools.

        I love kicad, but it used to have some really rough edges in spite of being simpler compared to something like Altium.

        • helenslunch@feddit.nl
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          29
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          This is the modern “choice”:

          1. Paid software that exploits their own paying customers’ data and pushes regular ads for their own or for other products while simultaneously increasing prices.

          2. FOSS software that respects it’s users but also is nearly incapable of doing the job it’s supposed to.

          • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            33
            ·
            1 year ago

            The FOSS stuff can do the job. You just need to tweak these 10 config files because it doesn’t come with sensible defaults. Oh, and it’s built against a different version of those libraries. Better downgrade two and upgrade that third one. Actually, just fork and modify the source. Much easier. What were we trying to do again?

      • ByteWelder@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’ve used FreeCAD for a few months for small/medium-sized projects and it crashes way too often. It’s pretty much unusable for me. I only use it for CAM these days and do my CAD with OnShape.

        • mvirts@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          I’m learning freecad now and can verify the crashiness, so far I’ve been learning the tools to avoid and having some luck

      • equidamoid@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        Freecad is… rough. But, it has python API, and that’s what I ended up using for almost all my stuff (there also was a period of using cadquery, but installing it is a horrible pain, so I gve up).

        Also using onshape every now and then, but many things are just too annoying to do with a gui.