Agree, I'm 80% software these days but ~8 years ago I discovered Eagle and found it was a huge relief at the time coming from Protel (now Altium).
I've been getting my feet wet again; perhaps Altium has fixed the UX which drove me away originally but they don't seem (until now?) to have had any entry-level appropriate pricing.
And whilst I could pick up Eagle 7 recently and get productive again real quick, the fact that I still had to draw my own PCB footprints which are intrinsically inseparable from the overall component definition is so disappointing.
A separate PCB footprint library, separate in the sense that component packages should be normalized and trivially re-usable across devices without error-prone copy-pasta madness seemed painfully obvious 10 years ago and it's still painfully obvious now. Drawing a new schematic symbol and wiring that up to physical pins in a PCB footprint is no big deal, but I just hate having to draw a new PCB footprint from a datasheet. Even on the off-chance that you can copy-paste from some other device with similar enough package, you still end up with inconsistent silkscreen/gate naming conventions etc. because each part library author does things differently.
You guys are both right. The incompatibility b/t PCB design tools and resources is farcical.
Unfortunately, software like web frameworks and office productivity gets so many more eyeballs than PCB design software. The market size of PCB design software is small. A single copy of gEDA/Altium/Eagle/Orcad/Kicad can produce a piece of hardware that one billion people use. You could say the same for a single copy of Word, but people own and interact with thousands of different documents, but only a handful to a dozen PCBs and most people are using the same ones (iPhone, laptop motherboard, etc.).
As more hobbyists engage at the Arduino level, simple, free tools can open up a bit... but professional stuff will still suffer severe inertial effects - the value of a single PCB design program is simply too huge.
I don't see this free(asterisk) offering from Altium as any more than a freemium pattern to divert marketshare from Eagle in particular. I use Eagle, but the EEs at work say Altium is full of bugs. Its 3d board viewer is a gimmick that hooks a lot of people, but it's not as critical as having the proper components.
p.s. for simple PCB design, there are numerous free tools:
I've been getting my feet wet again; perhaps Altium has fixed the UX which drove me away originally but they don't seem (until now?) to have had any entry-level appropriate pricing.
And whilst I could pick up Eagle 7 recently and get productive again real quick, the fact that I still had to draw my own PCB footprints which are intrinsically inseparable from the overall component definition is so disappointing.
A separate PCB footprint library, separate in the sense that component packages should be normalized and trivially re-usable across devices without error-prone copy-pasta madness seemed painfully obvious 10 years ago and it's still painfully obvious now. Drawing a new schematic symbol and wiring that up to physical pins in a PCB footprint is no big deal, but I just hate having to draw a new PCB footprint from a datasheet. Even on the off-chance that you can copy-paste from some other device with similar enough package, you still end up with inconsistent silkscreen/gate naming conventions etc. because each part library author does things differently.