FreeCAD

Earlier versions were very cumbersome, but 1.0 was a huge breakthrough, 1.1 blew my mind, and I predict things will just get better from here. Certainly competitive with commercial CAD. Has a few weak points, a few things that don't always work as they should, but so do commercial CAD offerings. Has a learning curve, but so does any. Probably the biggest oddity of it is that it has "workbenches" for various tasks that function somewhat independently - probably independently created with many community-developed ones available, learning which workbench to use for what is part of the learning curve. This also makes it incredibly powerful and adaptable, vastly more than I've learned (so far).

Only major limitation versus commercial CAD is it doesn't have access/revisioning control, which is important for working on a team (for a company) (There was some effort by a partnering company to create this but it was abandoned) but for individual/at home use that doesn't matter. So for non-professional applications there is ZERO reason to use anything else, and it would do fine for some professional contexts as well.

Free Open Source is wonderful - not only free, but no hassling with licenses, and canceling a subscription or a company discontinuing something won't render your past projects inaccessible. Open Source means tons of extensions and plugins are available to do a wide range of things, and anyone seeking to do things it (or any program) can't do (such as research institutions) can build their own. Cross-platform, and relatively lightweight - can download and install in a couple minutes while I recall commercial CAD taking up many gigabytes and around an hour to download/install. I could fresh-install and run this in less time than it took to open and log into already-installed Autodesk Fusion.

I walked away from FreeCAD a few short years ago (last year?). I had found it complex, clunky and unintuitive. Incredibly, the current version (1.0.1) is absolutely wonderful. Night and day. The design process feels natural and well structured, the interface is clear, operations are fast. Everything seems so well bundled together, and so far, no bugs! I'm very impressed and look forward to learning its features. The community is apparently very much alive, and there are countless tutorials available. Personally, I've kick-started my learning using DeltaHedra's video tutorial titled "FreeCAD 1.0 Release - Ultimate Complete Beginner Tutorial" which I thought did a great job of covering essentials and quickly made me feel at home with FreeCAD. Thanks to all FreeCAD developers and contributors.

Complex Peace of software. If new to FreeCAD i recomended to do at least one or two tutorials specially if make use of Part Design AND Sketcher. Does not mean that there is no room for improvement that it there off course enough. But every Major version is a big step forward.

Another great thing is that it is (almost )fully customizable. You can create your own style-sheets or extensions. A lot of already exist. Some of them exist because they should have been core for a long time. But this is the core of FreeCAD: Open source. So everybody can do what he wants to improve. And working on the core is more difficult than a external Workbench. And because of that it is open source feel free to buy the developers a coffee!

Engineer the world

TL;DR JUST GO AWAY ! I want to cry when I see a mess like that exists. Honestly. I have to switch back to X11 to get any 3D render while it's the only software that have a render issue like that. I got a lot of trouble with constraint. When it says it's fully OK, I already lost multiple hours. And when I finally finish my project, some of them just broke after reopening saying more 90% of constraints are not OK. Seriously ? Worst, if you are lucky and it's OK, just tweaking your table of measuring on which your constraint are based on, it sometime flipped the constraint with NO REASON !! That's an insult, more because there are no possibility to fix the right way. Also, if you were new into FreeCAD like me, you probably thought that your wire is closed because mathematically the vertices are at the same place. AND NO. You can restart for nothing because "that's discrete" (or a garbage software, no ?) I lost a ton of hours and multiple projects with a non-negligible amount of research on forums because this software is a total mess. I just tried OpenSCAD thinking it's harder but in only half an hour I finished my part reading doc included while on FreeCAD after 3 hours my part is still broke or ugly. I also learned SolidWorks at school, and I don't remember to have issues like FreeCAD create.

Edit: I would like to say that render issues are maybe caused by my GPU. Unfortunately, I'm now on AMD with drivers, and it's render as 0.3FPS. FreeCAD is the software I regret the most to have used in my whole life.

What intrigues me about FreeCad, aside from it being free, is that it is cross-platform between Linux and Windows, and even Autocad in allowing DWG import/export. Neither Autocad, nor Revit ,will run on Linux without a virtual machine. I keep running into Microsoft issues, and would like to be able to work remotely with the assurance that if my operating system went down, I could still work on Linux instead. FreeCad seems able to do it all. Most people who have had to use Cad systems that aren't Autocad probably don't want to try anything that is new after companies made them use other odd systems. FreeCad sounds like it is. In the past it stalled out on me.. probably due to my system. and I'm glad to give it another try in 2024.

totally not beginner friendly, where is all the creative tools? it looks like just a viewing software i can't do anything with it