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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 20th, 2023

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  • FreeCAD’s UI is good enough to work, but not to everyone’s taste. Personally, I detest the clown car UI of Fusion and it’s lack of customization for my work flow - custom pie menus rock. Something that FreeCAD allows the user to do. Not to mention the half-assed mix of local install/cloud that is Fusion360. It locks your projects in the cloud subject to AutoDesk’s whims, but eats your local storage. At least OnShape and TinkerCAD is all cloud and honest about it. But it’s all pay to play if you want access to the good stuff.

    They are improving the FreeCAD UI slowly. The Ondsel version, (based on the 0.22 Dev release), gets high marks from a lot of users about the UI design. Not my personal cup 'o tea, but I do see the allure for many users. Besides, if you don’t like how it works, you can easily customize things to your personal tastes.







  • bluewing@lemm.eetolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldGNU-Linux
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    4 months ago

    Perhaps it is a tragedy that we seem to have lost the GNU part. But in the end, the great unwashed masses get to decide what something is called.

    Personally, I blame the Brits for this, (and NOT the French this time), because of their penchant for trying to chop every multi-syllable word down into as few as possible. See: Football vs Soccer silliness.




  • Extended compliance support. Enterprise level needs require a lot of paperwork just to make sure you are in legal compliance with all rules and regulations. The paperwork alone can be a very heavy costly burden on the IT department.

    Any distro wanting to be serious in the enterprise space needs to offer support for that. And businesses will pay for it because it’s cheaper than having a large staff only dedicated to it. It’s part of how Ubuntu can offer you the free stuff and remain a top used distro for the masses. RedHat does the same. RedHat just rebrands the free stuff as Fedora. At least Ubuntu doesn’t hide behind a different brand name when offering sercives they charge for.


  • From my look at it, Ubuntu is making it clear that they guarantee support for 10 years, rather than just the standard 4 of LTS releases. And they are also guaranteeing compliance for enterprise uses, saving the paperwork load and time. This could make Ubuntu Pro attractive for enterprises and the IT department. Everyone wants to limit the paperwork checks. Us plebes, can make do with the free standard 4 years of LTS support if that’s what you want.

    I’m quite sure that any distro that offers enterprise solutions is doing similar things just for the money. RedHat does it for sure. But us plebes don’t ever see it because we use Fedora instead.





  • Well, threads are actually quite easy to create in FreeCAD these days. Unless you need some kind of specialty thread, like say a light bulb thread or British ME, (Model Engineer), thread.

    The Hole tool is merely point and select the thread you want - your choice of modeled or not. Plus you can do countersinks and counterbores from the same tool. The Thread Profile workbench makes external and internal threads fast and easy. Make your choice of thread - vee, buttress, or ACME/Trapazoidal and three clicks later you got a thread. The Fasteners workbench will also let you create threads easily too. Gears and springs have become simple to make with no real modeling required anymore. I’ve been trying out the Sheet metal workbench lately also. Not very full featured yet, but it does the basics pretty well so far. So lots of quality of life improvements have been making their way into FreeCAD since 0.17.

    Where FreeCAD fails, (beside the TPN issue), is in the somewhat slower basic work flow. But, with customization, it can get pretty close to being fairly fast. But most users are casual users and don’t dig into settings very much. But the biggest issue is the lack of a decent single robust and integrated Assembly workbench. I can design parts all day long, but unless I can easily put them all together to see if and how they all work together, it makes FreeCAD a no-go for commercial work. I can’t even really design a model steam engine and assemble all the parts very easily.

    Now, Ondsell is working on a unifying assembly workbench that I have very high hopes for, but it’s not there yet. They do have a ways to go still.