this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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3DPrinting

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Can't even take a short break from 3D designing stuff. Glad I'm switching over to FreeCAD. All I wanted was to grab some dimensions from an old model.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (3 children)

This looks interesting. In your opinion, does it improve on FreeCAD much? I tried FreeCAD some time ago and I felt like an absolute moron

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

At this point it's a just a fork of FreeCAD with a slight UI overhaul and some usability improvements. It's still FreeCAD underneath. Ondsels product is their FreeCAD compatible collaborative cloud. They have made some changes to the workbenches to simply them and are contributing it back to main FreeCAD. But the learning curve is still there. The bugs on Windows that can crash your projects still occur. But you can use WSL to install the Linux version and not have any issues.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

It is not a fork aiming to replace it. It is rather a spin with saner defaults to cater to companies as customers. The product which shall carry ondsel financially is their freecad compatible cloud offering, and the hope is to use that for elevating freecad itself too. They need their spin to be able to ship an ootb experience fitting their motive and brand. So if you would like a less confusing experience it might be something for you. Currently there's a lot of borderline deprecated and also redundant functionality in freecad, so I hope that ondsel's cleanup mantra will make it to the ootp upstream experience as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

One of the big changes in my opinion is the addition of a "Smart Dimension" tool where the system interprets and previews the constraint that you want to apply instead of requiring you to pick the specific constraint ahead of time(almost identical to SOLIDWORKS), and the ability to add constraints such as length while drawing out shapes (like Autodesk Inventor, probably also Fusion but I haven't used that). It makes the sketcher workflow more like other CAD programs and requires a little less manual work with constraints.