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Title basically.
One of my windows computers, which happens to be the one I happen to do the most CAD work on, can't upgrade to windows 11 due to having an Ivy Bridge era Xenon (it's an E5-1680 v2 for the curious, older used workstations are fantastic bang for the buck computers).
Switching to Linux on this computer has been in the cards for a while, but I hadn't been in a hurry to do it. Looks like my hand might be getting forced...
You'll need to get used to many new things when switching to Linux. Changing to FreeCAD could as well be one of those
It will be frustrating, and it will take some time to get used to but honestly it's worth it. If not for anything else then to flex your brain cells and keep them nimble
I second freeCAD for complicated designs. For simple stuff I use tinkercad which runs from web browser
Personally I'd say go with freeCAD even for simple designs too. Its a great way to learn the software and you will not end up adjusting you designs to the limitations that tinkercad has. Them the transition to more complicated designs will be less painful
Also I feel like it is difficult to do premise placement on tinkercad
Does FreeCAD do CAM too?
It has a dedicated CAM workbench yeah
Here are some YouTube tutorials for CAM in freeCAD https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaUEbWaf2rhSGcjQK9LYuL4PkV1GzjeIY
And the CAM category on the freeCAD wiki https://wiki.freecad.org/Category:CAM
I tried it some time ago and it was pretty usable, I reckon it is only better now.
I've dabbled in Linux in the past and spend the majority of my time popping between windows and mac os. I also spend a decent amount of time in powershell/terminal, but largely in the context of work.
I'm not against investing the time learn new things, but time is very scarse these days with two younger kids.
My modeling workflow is often iterative and fusion's timeline makes it very easy to edit a feature from way back when and then propagate that change through all subsequent steps that reference that feature. You can also add entirely new features and then update the next step in the timeline to reference them. The last time I looked at alternatives this either wasn't supported or was fickle, but based on some comments in this post that may have changed. I'll have to give FreeCAD a try.
I think it's called parametric design right?, freeCAD suppports this but I have heard that there is a bug when trying to edit shapes with filet I think?
Yes, this approach is called parametric design. FreeCAD struggled with the topological naming problem for quite some time, which basically means that internally named things, and references to them, can break under certain situations. Exposure to this problem increased as the thing getting molded became more complicated, which seemed maddening from a user's perspective. It seems like it may have been fixed in the main branch somewhat recently, which I was not aware of. That's good news.
They have since released V1 that seems to be pretty solid. Still not 100% but for a free software it is a very useful tool that gets most jobs done
It's about as good as Tinkercad.
Oh no. Way better that Tinkercad if you ask me. I have already been able to make way more complicated shapes and designs than I had ever thought possible with Tinkercad