We are shutting down Ondsel

Unfortunate but extremely predictable. The commercial market for CAD cares about CAD that actually works, not free software ideals. FreeCAD is simply not in the same league as commercial CAD like Solidworks, NX, Creo, etc. IMO it's not even in the same league as SolveSpace, at least last time I used it (which was admittedly some years ago).

It was absolutely worth a try.

Blender suffered the same sort of issues as FreeCAD does, but managed to get out of the slump.

It is often important to have a main player enforcing proper, unified UI/UX and fix the many small problems and bugs which drive users away. Sadly it is usually an issue with long running and highly complex open source software that it gets really fragmented. You see that in every function having its own button or workspace, inconsistent naming, functions which do the same but slightly different and things working differently depending on some context where they really should not.

Thanks to the people from Ondsel it felt like FreeCad would be on a similar route to Blender. It was way more user friendly thankfully there has been major back porting.

So there has been a lot of progress especially with the upcoming 1.0. You should give one of the Release Candidates a try. I use it for my 3D printing projects and it works pretty well.

The parent comment rephrased: 'oh it was a useless effort like any other effort to push open source in CAD'. (Not true btw, Blender is an institution in non-parametric design, the niche for open-source is just for parametric CAD).

How is open source supposed to break through to this 'market' as you call it? Should we just give up instead?

I think the main sentiment was more about FreeCAD being extremely bad to use, and not against Ondsel's efforts to make it better.

I just tried installing the new RC of FreeCAD, and it's still a horrible horrible unusable mess (despite all the improvements of Ondsel).

Anyone trying is probably better off starting from scratch on the GUI, and only extracting the algorithmic bits from FreeCad.

FreeCAD is already based on a geometry kernel (OpenCASCADE), and what were Ondsel doing you suppose?

Dune 3D is not too far away from that: https://dune3d.org/

Blender is a great success story, but even that started from a commercial codebase. Even Blender, which is aimed at artists, had a pretty awful UX for a long time. It only got tooltips relatively recently.

I think the UX situation is even worse in open source CAD and EDA because they're written by... you know. Kicad and Geda have abysmal UX. Only recently have we got Horizon that is pretty good.

The only open source CAD software I've seen that is in any way remotely usable is SolveSpace. It's actually quite good but it has a few big limitations:

* No bevels or fillets

* Small holes become diamonds; I'm not sure why but apparently it was quite hard to have an angular precision for some reason

* The UI is quite odd; some custom toolkit.

IMO if you switched it to Qt, fixed the other two issues, and spent some effort promoting it (it seems to be relatively unknown for some reason) that would go a loooong way towards "good CAD". Hopefully it would take mindshare away from FreeCAD which is just giving open source CAD a bad name.

Have you tried Dune3D yet? I found it surprisingly usable, enough so that it seemed worth making some detailed notes on the tutorial:

https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/118

which, unlike almost every other traditional 3D tool I've tried I was actually able to complete.