FreeCAD

I use FreeCAD and Assembly3 for everything and have for many years now. I sometimes use realthunder’s fork of FreeCAD but right now it’s quite a bit behind upstream and there are some cool new features in sketcher so I use upstream for those.

Some people get confused about workflow in FreeCAD because there are so many options and every youtube video has different opinions or tries to feature a particular workbench like curves or something. My opinion… Pretty much your workflow starting out should be to ignore everything else and use part design and sketches, it’s the simplest way:

0. enable autosave with a short interval, like 2min

1. Switch to part design workbench

2. create body

3. create sketches as the base of the features of your part attached to the xy, xz, yz planes, offset them to create a “wire frame” that resembles your project

   a. Your sketches should be fully constrained

   b. Your sketches should have as little geometry in them as possible, if you need more complex stuff make more sketches

   c. Your sketches should have closed wires, you can’t pad something that doesn’t create a face.

4. use pad, pocket, revolution, loft, and hole operations on those sketches to form a 3d solid

5. if you need to create additional sketches which import geometry from the previous operations (using the external geometry tool), import SKETCH geometry from the previous ops, not edges of solids, whenever possible. Hide your solid, unhide your sketch, select that with the external geometry tool.

   a. Use sketch on face sparingly.

6. Do fillets and chamfers last, if you need to change something, delete them and recreate them once you’ve made your changes.

To make multiple parts make multiple bodies with the same workflow as above.

Once you get pretty good at making static parts with constrained geometry, holes, threads (with the hole function), etc, which you can do with only the stuff above, then you can branch out into other workbenches like assemblies or curves, but all of those things build on the concepts above, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed if you try to do it all right from the start. Learning how to recover from a mistake is just part of CAD in general, though I admit that it’s a bit more effort to find what’s wrong in FC vs commercial platforms, but we aren’t here, on lemmy, in a linux community, to use commercial platforms.

AFAIK that’s pretty much the same workflow as F360 uses for single-solid parts though things have different names. pad=extrude for example.

It’s obviously far from perfect but in my opinion it’s the best solution that runs natively on Linux and is actually open source. Also assembly3 uses solvespace as it’s backend solver so if you make assemblies using that you are kindof using solvespace too.

Also, I hear/read a lot of complaining about instability but I’ve honestly never had a crash that wasn’t on an experimental branch like RT or the edge release of upstream. However step 0 above should help if you’re worried about that.

KiCAD for circuit boards FreeCAD to import those boards and do everything else

I like to use openSCAD which uses code to describe objects so it’s probably not for everyone.

Sadly, I couldn’t fine even one that was at least usable in my experience.

I model a lot for 3D-printing, and of course tried FreeCAD.
It had a very steep learning curve and is very unique in its workflow, compared to other CADs.
I somehow got the hang of it, but it still was very much not usable.
It crashed every 5 minutes, the UI is very convoluted, and even the simplest tasks take half an hour, compared to the 2 minutes it takes on other software.

Since Fusion360 doesn’t work on Linux, there’s pretty much only Onshape.
Apart from being a SaaS-product (“cloud based”), and therefore out of your control, which I strongly dislike, it’s absolutely great UX wise.

But good news, there are people working on a solution. I will add the name of the project later if I can remember it again.
Edit: found it: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d

There are also people forking the engine and some core features of FreeCAD and want to turn it into something better, but I don’t know if they’ve made something out of that idea yet.

I have tried openSCAD and FreeCAD, they are both good in their own right, but utimatly they also both have very steep learning curves. I suppose Blender can also be used for CAD but I have no experience with it. I just want to quickly design some parts for 3D printing as a hobby and don’t feel like spending hundreds of hours learning those tools. I am current using Onshape.com, it works well on Linux/Firefox, suits my needs and free to use with some limitations. But it is proprietary :(

Depends on what your using it for? For 3d printers I like FreeCAD. Though it has a bit of an initial learning curve. It has a lot of functionally. SolveSpace was pretty good but I had some trouble with fillets and things. Might have been user errors… I havent used blender much but heard its good for more artistic modeling for games and videos. Not sure if it would work good for 3d parts? Anyone use it for that?

Artistic modelling i use Blender but Parametric modelling I used FreeCAD.

Despite having worked with CAD software, both were a little hard to wrap my head around initially, but I watched like 2 hours of video tutorials each and I figured it out enough for my needs.

OpenSCAD has a learning curve, but it’s rad af.

For 2D CAD, LibreCAD

I’m using freecad exclusively and got everything I need to quickly model something for 3D-Printing.

One that hasn’t been named yet is SolveSpace. There is also CAD sketcher, a free CAD add-on for Blender

If you’re open to code CAD look at build123d

Honestly? Not much. FreeCAD is an abomination, so I’m keeping one of my computers on Windows so that I can still use Fusion360

I’ve been using SALOME to create parametric 3D geometry. My use case is to parameterize my geometry features and export to STL files that I use with OpenFOAM. SALOME is integrated with a couple of grid generators, and I really like it’s 2D/triangulation/STL integration with netgen. You can specify faces for refinement to a desired mesh size, so for example around complex features you can create a fine STL mesh and on simple shapes you can have a really coarse mesh.

I’ve found the 3D modeling to be pretty straightforward, and SALOME usually does a pretty good job if you have to go back and modify previous features (something I’ve struggled with in FreeCAD).

I’ve also used FreeCAD for mesh generation, and it works ok but I’ve found the triangulation leaves a lot to be desired for splitting up the mesh as needed for OpenFOAM boundaries.

If you’re making STL files for 3D printing and you want a parametric CAD modeler for engineering parts, give it a try. If you want complex faces with artistic style, I would suggest Blender.