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Comment by shadowpho | Hacker News Reader

It’s usable now. I’ve been playing with it on and off and it’s night and day to what it was before

It is not. There are still ridiculous hoops you have to jump through to orient your sketch. The first thing I do is draw an arrow that points up in the sketch and then reorient the sketch. The reason for this is that the attachment editor just randomly picks a "random" orientation based on the "orientation" of the face or datum plane you are using. The attachment editor is fundamentally broken and needs a complete revamp.

The other part is that FreeCAD is still this "enter numbers by hand and hope for the best" CAD tool. When you perform an extrusion, there are no visual arrows to pull the extrusion along. When you do a pocket and it goes in the wrong direction you just see nothing, instead of a transparent preview of the operation that is being attempted.

I say this as someone who built a design in the Assembly 4 workbench using dozens of individual parts and probably redesigned every part at least twice. Sure the official assembly workbench is a good idea in the very long run, but they fixed none of the short term pain points I have. You know, things you run into every single damn day. Meanwhile migrating to the new assembly workbench will cost me even more time. I.e. there are switching costs but hardly any benefits.

I tend not to use the assembly workbenches, I just manually position separate bodies in space at the position and orientation I want them.

You can use "LinkGroup" to group a bunch of them together so that they move as one unit.

> night and day to what it was before

This reminds me of iirc KiCAD 5 to KiCAD 6. Overnight it went from some weird clearly-Linux program to become a viable product, an excellent one even.

KiCAD uses FreeCAD on the backend for things.

I’d love to see FreeCAD take the same path!!!

However… when I looked at it last year the “let’s draw a cup” tutorial was so pathetically bad I closed it and went right back to solidworks without a second thought.

I think a lot of that is a Cathedral vs. Bazaar problem.

Programmers like to work on problems which are technologically interesting, and they love adding new features. Dealing with technical debt and solving UX/UI issues isn't as much fun, so in a Bazaar model they'll simply not do it. The result is a product which feature-wise is very powerful, but UX-wise an absolute nightmare to use.

But when there's a party genuinely interested in the product as a whole, they can push more Cathedral-like UX-focused development. Have a handful of devs focus on UI stuff for a year or two, and it has suddenly turned into a world-class product. Blender and KiCad have gone through this before, and it seems like Ondsel is pushing something similar for FreeCAD. Let's hope it works!

The changes from KiCAD 3 => 4 got me to finally switch off EAGLE CAD, for which I had a $1600 license, but could see the looming subscription nonsense coming with Autodesk's interest in EAGLE. IIRC that was the first release after CERN took on development and had been dogfooding it. Every release since then has been a major improvement, and we've converted several customers from Altium to KiCAD in that time.

I can make FreeCAD go, but we still have to manually create dimensioned printsets for our sheet metal shops, rather than just being able to hand off a drawing file. I feel like when we get to the point of just being able to hand off a drawing file, it'll be in a much better place.

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