Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

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user1234
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Re: Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

Post by user1234 »

grd wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 4:31 pm You can contribute if you want to.
I really want to, but my skill are still to weak.

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Re: Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

Post by grd »

user1234 wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 4:03 pm
grd wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 4:31 pm You can contribute if you want to.
I really want to, but my skill are still to weak.

Greetings
user1234
Thanks! And neither are mine ;)
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Re: Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

Post by sliptonic »

user1234 wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 4:03 pm
grd wrote: Sat Aug 13, 2022 4:31 pm You can contribute if you want to.
I really want to, but my skill are still to weak.
I see this from time to time and I want to push back.

Part of the reason that FOSS software lags behind the commercial alternatives isn't a lack of developers. It's that FOSS developers also end up running the project, doing documentation, answering user questions, coaching new developers and other maintainers. If the project gets big enough, they have to manage servers, coordinate translation, and reconcile the finances. It never ends.

Companies like a*desk have huge organizations but only a small fraction are software developers. The rest are doing marketing, accounting, graphic art, social media, managing servers, running usability studies, organizing conferences, and a million other important tasks.

Kunda/Luzpaz has become one of the most important contributors to this project and does very little with code. Their triage of bugs, management of twitter, and forum participation is incredibly valuable. Sure, this work frees up developers to do more development, but also most developers couldn't do this work half as well. I could say the same thing about many contributors in this community.

Here's a great article about breaking apart the monolith. I don't agree with everything in there and I still found some great insights.

If you really want to contribute to the development and don't feel like your skills are strong enough, start by triaging bugs, refactoring code, adding comments, and especially, adding unit tests.
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Re: Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

Post by user1234 »

sliptonic wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 4:33 pm I see this from time to time and I want to push back.
Already contributed, is not the case that i am lazy or want to be a parasite and only want to benfit of the work of FreeCAD and want not to give anything back. But i work minimum 60h in a week (on my own, often more) and i am often on sites for some time. And there are often no telephone or internet connection, or even a computer (besides i am often wrecked from the work).

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Re: Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

Post by sliptonic »

user1234 wrote: Sun Aug 14, 2022 4:48 pm Already contributed, is not the case that i am lazy or want to be a parasite ...
I know you're a contributor. Sorry if that came across as critical. I was trying to push back on the idea that it's all about the code.

There's the weird idea that seems to pervade FOSS projects that developers _should_ give away the fruits of their effort but specialists in other areas like accounting, art, business, law, psychology never do and shouldn't be expected to. At the same time, we say that it's great if someone _wants_ to contribute to the project but it's wrong if we _expect_ them to contribute something.

Don't misunderstand. I don't think we should ever require contribution. There's a difference between requiring and expecting though. I do expect people to contribute and I'm disappointed when they don't.
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Re: Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

Post by Kunda1 »

ah shucks, @sliptonic :o :oops:
Thanks for the shout-out :D
Your points are solid (not just because you highlighted my volunteer work :lol:) It's something I've learned time and time again since I started contributing in the ways i know how - contributing is a lot more than coding. It's about 'leaning in' and asking "how can i help here?". It creates goodwill and kick-starts change. It creates camaraderie.

I know there are a lot of haters, but the fact is SO many people are looking at FreeCAD and want it to succeed. Especially when we all know and see the trends of where proprietary software agreements are taking us with Software as a Service cloud-based environments. FLOSS is the last bastion against corporate greed and software autonomy. Proprietary CADs are squeezing their user-base to their breaking-point and they come our way. I've been watching this trend and it's crystal clear to me that I need to help create the conditions for smarter folks than myself to help, create, fix, and maintain what makes FreeCAD possible and succeed.

I'll see myself out :D
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Re: Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

Post by paddle »

I personally understand all the people who are criticizing FreeCAD learning curve. As I myself tasted that frustration and raged-quit twice before trying again a third. I can't understand people condescendingly saying 'It's just a different way of doing things you idiots!'.

There are a lot of things that makes no sens in FreeCAD and that are down right frustrating. Besides a lot of quality of life features are missing.

Which doesn't mean that the whole FreeCAD is a bad thing. A lot of things are perfectly good, even better than commercial softwares. It's just the annoying things that spoil the whole thing.

Frustrating things example : Try to copy paste a sketch. That should be easy yet somehow it ends up so puzzling.
Another example : Carbon copy tool. If you are not pressing whatever key combinaison that I don't even remember, you can't select a non-parallel sketch. And to know that you have to read the status bar. I mean the guy just want to copy paste a sketch because he was intimidated by the 'Dependency selector', and he just can't get a rest.

It's very easy to turn the blind eye on these kind of issue when you're already an expert of the thing. But when you learn from scratch a new software it's just so painful.
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Re: Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

Post by grd »

paddle wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 6:01 am I personally understand all the people who are criticizing FreeCAD learning curve. As I myself tasted that frustration and raged-quit twice before trying again a third. I can't understand people condescendingly saying 'It's just a different way of doing things you idiots!'.
That is easy because when you are gonna ask the same question a dozen of times you can be a little bit irritating too. The problem is however that the same issue is here and it doesn't change. That is the fundamental issue.
There are a lot of things that makes no sens in FreeCAD and that are down right frustrating. Besides a lot of quality of life features are missing.
Yes, and we all know them (well I know a couple of them).
Frustrating things example : Try to copy paste a sketch. That should be easy yet somehow it ends up so puzzling.
Another example : Carbon copy tool. If you are not pressing whatever key combinaison that I don't even remember, you can't select a non-parallel sketch. And to know that you have to read the status bar. I mean the guy just want to copy paste a sketch because he was intimidated by the 'Dependency selector', and he just can't get a rest.
This for example.
It's very easy to turn the blind eye on these kind of issue when you're already an expert of the thing. But when you learn from scratch a new software it's just so painful.
I agree and I think that this kind of things need to be fixed. But the main question is: How can these issues be fixed?
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Re: Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

Post by drmacro »

grd wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 6:12 am ...
I agree and I think that this kind of things need to be fixed. But the main question is: How can these issues be fixed?
And, here we are back at the same point every one of these new user complaint threads reaches.

File a bug report...if it is a bug.

File a feature request...if it is a feature.

Then wait and use the techniques that folks in the forums or other media offer to proceed with your work.

Since there are very few volunteer developers, who work in their spare time, using the offered techniques may just become muscle memory while you wait.

If you can't wait, then fire up your dev environment and get coding (just as paddle has done...)

Get a wiki edit login and help write documentation that will help new users transition. Or, any other area involved in making FreeCAD better.
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Re: Fusion360 has hiked its prices once again. Brace yourselves, CADfugees are coming

Post by Zolko »

paddle wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 6:01 am I personally understand all the people who are criticizing FreeCAD learning curve.
Me too: I recently wanted to show FreeCAD to my brother, also en engineer, and wanted to guide him through all the initial installation process and show the first steps to create something useful. So we started with a fresh FreeCAD install, with the default config, and indeed, FreeCAD is not usable in that state. Not usable as in : "not usable". It's IMPOSSIBLE to get ANYTHING done in a fresh stock FreeCAD install. Heck, there isn't a proper tree-view, it's mixed with the property and task and selector and whatever panels, it needs to be manually enabled in the preferences in some hidden corner ! ALL CAD programs have a tree-view on the left side of the window, but some smart-arse thinks that FreeCAD should NOT have this by default, but should hide it behind some obscure undocumented configuration option with the label "beware of the leopard".

paddle wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 6:01 am Which doesn't mean that the whole FreeCAD is a bad thing. A lot of things are perfectly good, even better than commercial softwares. It's just the annoying things that spoil the whole thing.
...
It's very easy to turn the blind eye on these kind of issue when you're already an expert of the thing. But when you learn from scratch a new software it's just so painful.
Yes, that's the whole point: FreeCAD internals are very good, powerful and easy to use, and the UI can be tweaked to both look good and be functional. Keyword being : "CAN BE". But by defaults it's not. By defaults it's ugly and dysfunctional. There were projects about user preferences pack, where did that one go ? Some people collected various power-user config files, what did that bring ? There was a thread about default workbenches to include, did it bring some answers ?

It would be trivial to ship a good initial user config file, and 99% of the complaints would disappear. Compare my start-up window and the default start-up window !

freecad_me.png
freecad_me.png (199.61 KiB) Viewed 979 times

freecad_default.png
freecad_default.png (156.31 KiB) Viewed 979 times

what could someone do with that ?
try the Assembly4 workbench for FreCAD — tutorials here and here
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