alt Hacker NewsIt's incorrect, then!
Lots changed since 2020 in the current 1.0.2 release, including TNP mitigations and the core assembly workbench.
The 1.1 developer release (which is stable and useful and getting quite close to final release) contains further TNP mitigations; further improvements to the core assembly workbench; radically better lighting; datums have moved into the core; there's a way of enabling the advanced attachment mode in Part Design; compound body support in Part Design by default; significant comfort improvements in Sketcher, transparent previews, dragger gadgets and improved pattern tools in Part Design; support for external intersection geometry, Qt6 GUI improvements; lots of improvements to the Preferences panels, and that's before looking at FEM, BIM and CAM.
Oh and the Ondsel stuff — the web sharing service, its plugin and its headless worker support — is also under the control of the FreeCAD project, free of its AWS dependencies and being actively maintained.
It's still idiosyncratic but it goes way, way beyond looks. There was a big hump to get over between 0.21 and 1.0, re-engineering RealThunder's TNP mitigations to be more practical and adding the core Assembly workbench, but there's been enormous progress since.
HN's negativity around FreeCAD no longer astonishes me because I think HNers in general have a rather misbegotten sense of what GUI CAD even is, what its strengths are instead of just its weaknesses, and how much of a challenge something with FreeCAD's scope really is. I mean Dune3D is interesting but frustrating still, SALOME is interesting but has huge money behind it; FreeCAD is the sort of hard-won, low-governance, pure-open-source-no-corporate-bullshit project HNers should prefer. Is it the equal of commercial CAD packages? No it's not. It's a different beast and an absolute social good.
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It's not negativity. My workflow literally hasn't changed in years. The only difference I've noticed has been cosmetic.
Maybe I don't use FreeCAD to it's fullest (I don't) and maybe I don't stay on top of the latest changes (I don't), but I learned years ago to avoid the TNP, and haven't been bothered by it since.
The only noticeable changes in recent years to me have been window dressing, plain and simple. Maybe crashes are less often, but I've also learned not to do things that cause crashes many years ago.
TNP is much better, but not entirely solved. There are also still lots of minor issues that crop up during normal workflows, particularly when importing geometry from other sketches. I ran into this exact issue just this past week, where importing a half circle from a previous sketch breaks every time I update a dimension in DynamicData (a dimension that isn't used even), but if I manually select "recompute object" it recalculates everything totally fine.
Then I tweak a dimension, model flags an error, I select "recompute object" and it's fine. No geometry errors detected at any point. Presumably FreeCAD is recomputing the object when I'm updating the dimensions, so why does a manual recomputation fix the problem but the automatic one doesn't? Overall FreeCAD is pretty good, but I have yet to do a FreeCAD project where I don't run into something weird like this that I have to suffer through or work around.
I agree with this. Per my comment just above, I've been one of the HNers recommending against FreeCAD for years, because that was my experience.
I've recently started to change that opinion; using the build I linked above, it's now pretty usable and competitive/usable for a hobbyist. I'm now considering it my first-line CAD package (until proven otherwise!)