FreeCAD has improved immensely over the past 2-3 years in terms of stability and features. A decade ago it was not uncommon for me to experience crashes from it randomly losing its GLX context or the constraint solver segfaulting for some reason. Now it's rare for it to crash at all for me, though I still run into a lot of constraint solver errors that are a pain to deal with.
However, despite the recent improvements, I still cannot recommend it for new users compared to commercial solutions for the sole reason of the Topological Naming Issues: https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem
This issue has been probably the #1 problem I've had with FreeCAD since I started using it. And though I've learned how to design parts to get around the problem in most situations, it's a huge hurdle for newcomers to understand and get around. Luckily there's a fork that fixes a significant number of the issues: https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD_assembly3 and https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD
I've also heard of Ondsel, which is supposedly a much more user friendly version of FreeCAD that also includes some fixes to the issue: https://ondsel.com/
- Realthunder’s branch contains unique, forked changes that will cause file incompatibility with core freecad if you use them unknowingly
- Core freecad is ahead in many, many ways and improving quickly
- the Realthunder branch is likely a dead end
The TNP mitigation from the Realthunder branch is very close to being enabled in 0.22, and the feature freeze for 1.0 is weeks away. 1.0 is currently targeted for early August.
My feeling is that it would be much better to learn what the topological naming problem is, and how it can be worked around, and then use Ondsel 2024.2 or a 0.22 weekly release until the TNP mitigation is mainstream. (It’s likely to be in 0.22 very soon indeed)
My thinking is straightforward: there are and will be more tutorials and more support for this route, and learning about how to mitigate TNP is not wasted info: it will teach you useful skills for making generally robust designs, TNP or not.
Among others, Mango Jelly Solutions has a recent video about TNP, and Brodie Fairhall’s video on the topic is worth seeing.
As mentioned elsewhere earlier [0] essentially all of Ondsel’s user-friendliness is actually core 0.22 (development release) FreeCAD and different addon choices (like the tab bar).
Which is not to say that Ondsel 2024.2 is a bad way to experience those things, or that the Ondsel Lens (cloud collaboration suite) is not interesting, because it surely is.
It’s just to say it is only much more user-friendly if you’re not already using the 0.22 dev releases (that are considered to be generally as stable as 0.21 and are in wide use)
(I upvoted you for the rest: I too am waiting for the TNP mitigations before I recommend it to less technically-focussed people)
However, despite the recent improvements, I still cannot recommend it for new users compared to commercial solutions for the sole reason of the Topological Naming Issues: https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem
This issue has been probably the #1 problem I've had with FreeCAD since I started using it. And though I've learned how to design parts to get around the problem in most situations, it's a huge hurdle for newcomers to understand and get around. Luckily there's a fork that fixes a significant number of the issues: https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD_assembly3 and https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD
I've also heard of Ondsel, which is supposedly a much more user friendly version of FreeCAD that also includes some fixes to the issue: https://ondsel.com/
EDIT: Here's actually a better read of the topological naming issue, what's being done about it, and why it's difficult to fix: https://ondsel.com/blog/freecad-topological-naming/