With credit to xkcd for the original "Dependency" cartoon FOSDEM is an organisational masterpiece. The infrastructure and logistics of thousands of opensource people amassing around 59 stands and 9…
It's getting better, and it's critical that it do so, if for no other reason than to raise the floor that commercial offerings have to surpass to retain small-to-medium customers. I haven't committed to it, but I'm rooting for it and following it closely.
It's honestly probably in the good enough territory at this point for makers. I think I finally realised how freecad wants me to use it and found it much nicer to work with after that, and I think I found a camera control I can live with coming from primarily solidworks.
Definitely using more and more, for 70 cad/year I'll keep my solidworks maker sub for anything I find I can't do in freecad but I'm really going to try committing to using it this year as my primary cad package. There's still some quirks but I'm also way more willing to live with that with foss
Okay, sure it's getting better. But the reality is - you need to be able to depend on your CAD to work. I've used FreeCAD a lot. It simply isn't dependable and can't do the same things a different cad package can. It's parametric only by name.
Strongly disagree. There's nothing I can do in any of the commercial CAD programs that I can't do in FreeCAD. Most people just don't want to invest the time to learn it - and instead blame the tool. Yes, there's a learning curve and it requires understanding the tool's limitations, but if it wasn't for FreeCAD we'd have nothing in the free, open source space for CAD.
I've been doing work in freecad for a year and a half, learning all the time. I also jumped on Solidworks for startups. Freecad simply doesn't work for anything a tiny bit complicated. Both Solidworks and Fusion blow it out of the water in ease of use and reliability.
There are different cad packages that do everything that freecad does more intuitively, faster and neater. In addition they do a whole lot more than freecad does. I come from a "more technical understanding" - it just sucks compared to the competition.