I'm off to a great start learning FreeCAD today. I installed it on my iMac, then I spent over two hours trying to figure out why it wouldn't launch. MacOS had put the annoying "This is an application downloaded from the Internet; are you sure?" dialog on the second monitor where I wasn't looking.
Inkscape and The GIMP also prefer to put dialogs on my second monitor. I don't know why.
Anyway, I intend to model a brick today. Wish me better luck!
@kbob First of all, this is is great news. Secondly, I would be interested in hearing whether you think the methods you use in FreeCAD are different from how you would do it in F360.
I also use FreeCAD on macOS (in addition to Ubuntu), but I haven’t seen that warning dialog box since the first time I ran it. It runs quite well on a M3 with 36GB of RAM.
@chrishuck Okay, so I probably have 2,000 hours in F360 and 5 hours in FreeCAD. Hardly a fair comparison.
My first big issue with FC was, I couldn't select anything in sketches. Then I found the pick radius preference.
My second is that the sketch constraints are very different and I don't always know what I've constrained.
FC has a lot more/better keyboard shortcuts, and the Spacemouse worked out of the box.
1/N
@chrishuck The Part vs Part Design workspaces are intriguing -- AFAICT, F360's timeline is like Part Design, but Part is more flexible?
I haven't found named parameters in FC yet. thing_radius = 93.7mm; thing_diameter = 2 * thing_radius...
2/N
@chrishuck FC sketches are a lot more limited. Each sketch corresponds to one operation (AFAICT). This is an actual sketch from the Black LACK Stack Hack -- it shows a huge amount of layout and was the basis for 50 or more operations -- putting everything in one sketch let me see how it would fit together.
I don't know (yet) how I'd do that in FC.
3/N
@kbob @chrishuck I have yet to understand part vs partdesign. I think very early on I hit something I couldn't do in part, switched to partdesign and haven't yet found something that made me look at the difference again closely.
I feel there should be a tool tip pop up saying why you must use one vs the other. Or get rid of one or the other.
@poleguy @chrishuck I only know what I saw in this video. (I don't actually know anything; I just watched the video.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffNOA9XmaU8&list=PLWuyJLVUNtc3UYXXfSglVpfWdX31F-e5S&index=7
YouTube
@kbob @chrishuck If I watched this it was years ago. So I don't know anything, and I don't know what you saw in this video. :-)
If the answer requires me to watch a six minute video in which the first few comments say "it is not clear." Then I'll pass. I'll just use part design until I hit an issue that I can't get past. Then I'll go look up this video. 😄
This reinforces my original perception that it is not clear and possibly one or the other should be removed.
