Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alternatives.
Blender is an exception to the rule, and a rolemodel. For example, FreeCAD and KiCad are OK, but not as nice (especially re FreeCad) as paid alternatives. GIMP isn't on the same level as Photoshop.
I tried designing a relatively simple assembly in Freecad recently (again, as I've come back to it multiple times), and remembered how uniquely terrible some the design decisions have been. I mean, fundamentally user-hostile approaches to the most basic functionality, like rotating a part requires a left mouse + center mouse press in order and sketch lines not being created with center points. And when a user tried to give them feedback (someone else, not mine) civil feedback on the forum about it got a dev response of "Those are just our quirks, go back to Solidworks if you don't like it." I did end up having to fire up my Windows machine for Inventor.
I'm sure it has some level of feature parity with commercial CAD buried somewhere, but it's so hard to get to even on the new 0.19 pre-release that I genuinely wouldn't try to put it in the same conversation as Blender or KiCad as open alternatives to commercial software. It's just not there.
> like rotating a part requires a left mouse + center mouse press in order
That behavior is controlled by the Mouse Model [1] which can be changed with a selection menu in the bottom right of the window, or by right clicking anywhere in the viewport. I generally use Touchpad. While the default behavior is not desirable for you or me, it is based on a sort of standard interface type, so it's desirable for some. It could be possible to start a discussion about changing the default, but I just wanted to mention that this behavior is not set in stone.
> civil feedback on the forum about it got a dev response of "Those are just our quirks, go back to Solidworks if you don't like it."
Yes, this can be very frustrating to me sometimes too seeing people dismissed this way. There are several issues at play in the forums. Besides the most obvious one of expert blindness from people who have been using FreeCAD as it evolved, you have the problem of people who have the time and ability to help newcomers but not necessarily to fix tough underlying problems. At some point a certain jadedness creeps in and their desire to help can actually be harmful.
Hopefully after some time you'll be willing to give FreeCAD another shot as it is improving rapidly, although the problem space is so big it can seem to happen in spurts.
I appreciate your feedback on this--I did end up finding the Mouse Model documentation after a bit, but I think there was some frustration built in on my end by that point.
I'm certainly open to trying it again in the future, and honestly do hope that it becomes a feasible alternative at some point. In fact, I think think that for certain tasks, it's not that far away, but I think that some of the UI decisions, whether from expert blindness as you've pointed out or other reasons, will keep coming up as a point of friction for even moderately experienced CAD users from other programs unless there's a deliberate decision made to try to make the defaults and jump-right-in process more familiar to those coming from the existing options.
It's exactly what I want of a CAD tool: a parametric solver with a 3D UI and 2D sketches. I haven't really have an opportunity to use it a lot since I discovered it, though.
Solvespace is incredible for those with a more programmer-y mind and workflow, however it lacks more "advanced" features that sadly don't seem to have any momentum for implementation (at least last I checked) like chamfers/radiusses, helixes, and some other navigational and organizational features.
It's a fantastic platform though and I encourage all engineering/CAD nerds to try it out. It bridges the gap between writing OpenSCAD and using a full fledged CAD software perfectly.
Helical features are supported in the latest Solvespace release (3.0pre3). There has been some discussion of how chamfers, fillets, and draft angles might work, but the concensus has been that they would be tricky to add, and are not a priority for release 3.0.
When you say rotating a part do you mean rotating the view or using the draft rotate (or some other workbench's rotate) command?
FYI if you use the draft workbench you can snap to midpoints and then convert the autocad-equivalent draft workbench sketch to an inventor-equivalent part design / sketcher workbench sketch. You can also use the symmetry constraint in the sketcher workbench to constrain a point to the center of a line.
If you get familiar with it you can technically model almost anything you want[0], but if you want to go back and change a feature (which is kinda the entire point of parametric cad) it'll likely destroy your part if you're not using the topological naming branch. Freecad realistically needs 5-10 more years to get basic feature parity with professional CAD from the early 2000's and then another release or two focused entirely on stability.
[0]: Their opencascade geometry kernel has some moderately serious deficiencies for complex operations/objects, the assembly workbenches are just now approaching the point where they're stable enough that you can use them without having to rebuild your assembly every week, and while the new TechDraw workbench theoretically gives you the features you need to make manufacturing drawings (which is really the end goal for any professional CAD package, those are what you need to get your parts made) in practice it's too buggy to use with even simple assemblies.
Library management quirks aside, KiCad is pretty close to competitive unless you need simulation or other cutting edge features. If you're familiar with it and know what you're doing it'll get you where you need to go.
Also check out realthunder's freecad fork, they've made some good progress on topological naming (with the effect of keeping models far more stable through minor changes). It's still unusable for all but the lightest duty professional work but it's an improvement.
Didn't they address that sometime in the past two years? I remember updating KiCad and having some issues with the parts libraries, but after that it seemed as good as I could expect it to be.
I use it very, very rarely so really don't remember more than that.
It has gotten better and IIRC is supposed to continue to improve this year with v6, but it's still fragmented, clunky, and lacking features for professional use.
Footprints and schematic symbols should belong to a parent component class with provisions for inventory tracking, etc. Their library manager works fine for hobby level work but if you're doing production you'll have to have a separate component management process that you integrate yourself.
What they have is fine, it works, but it's a far cry from what you get with siemens eda (mentor graphics) or altium.
I have! About a year ago -- it has great library management, and is overall a very good effort that could take over KiCad's place over the next decade if they stagnate.
My criticism is mainly that the PCB layout tools were still buggy. I believe it is/was using some of KiCad's router code, but it took more work to get a layout done than doing the same thing in KiCad would. It also tended to get glitchy with increasing layout complexity. The schematic editor is a lot slower than KiCad's and not as feature-rich.
The GTK widgets look and work very nicely on gnome-based environments but have issues on kde / windows. To be fair that's a GTK issue and not a Horizon issue, but unless Horizon has changed a lot lately I'd have a hard time recommending it over KiCad right now for professional use.
I _really_ like KiCAD, it's my preference for anything simple because I absolutely love the workflow compared to Allegro or Altium (especially Altium). I actually really enjoy the library management as well.
That said, anything using an HDI stackup or a reasonable number of differential or matched traces, KiCAD becomes a struggle. Even simple things like a single pair can be pretty tricky if you have space constraints. These features are pretty fundamental for modern PCB design.
It seems like KiCAD v6 will be making a lot of progress to manage more complex stackups and impedance control, so I'm very excited to try it.
I'd also vouch for Krita. While I'm not a fan of it's window or layering system I think it has a nice balance of features compared to other digital painting software like Paint Tool Sai, Fire Alpaca, Corel, or Photoshop. I made the (mostly) full transition to it earlier last year and don't regret it.
I sort of disagree on Photoshop, most of the love for Photoshop seems to be just lock in to its existing work flow. I have not used Photoshop before using gimp, and for my use cases Gimps multiple window interface seemed to me the more usable interface.
Due to the subscription model, the UI is getting actively WORSE as well. You have to push new features to justify a subscription, and most of those seem to be taking the form of useless UI clutter and cruft. There hasn't been a truly valuable new feature in PS since around the CS2 days IMO.
Of those three, I think Firefox is the only one that could be said to be on par with their commercial counterparts. Inkscape is powerful, but the UI isn't very responsive or intuitive. LibreOffice is slow and buggy whenever I use it.
+1, thank god we've finally come to acknowledge and accept that Gimp has never been and will never be a professional alternative to Gimp for many users.
Out of curiosity, what proprietary alternatives have you been using and in what professional capacity?
"Substantially better" is a fairly large claim.
To be clear, I use Blender and regularly use Maya, Houdini etc and I think all of them, including Blender have so many pros and cons, that I'd hesitate to say any one is better than the other in general.
Yeah Eevee and grease pencil are the two standouts.
To your list of subjective metrics I'd also add scalability and performance. Also maybe pipelineibility. Each DCC has very different characteristics on those as well.
Blender has always had a decent source of funding compared to other open source projects, the ability to have full time devs has made a huge difference. Their open source media releases were also a huge success because they pushed the program and feature set to what people actually need when doing real work. Really an awesome project overall.
Well, that's all by intention. GIMP and Inkscape have always avoided trying to find that sort of funding: inkscape even allowing their lead developer to be hired away without making a fight for it at one point. It's why I have been trying to copy blender's model for Krita since forever.
What is Blender's funding model? I recall that its initial open source release was essentially crowdfunded before that was a trendy thing, but I haven't been keeping up with how they've been funding continuing development. They seem to be doing pretty well at that, so I'm curious about where the majority of revenue is coming from.
This is true, however, the commercial version bears almost no resemblance to what we have today. The open source community bears the lions share of the responsibility for how blender looks today.
It's not real Open Source if the community pays for it?
Studios en-mass deciding to fund a shared, Libre resource that anyone can use so that every studio can all benefit and get better features at a faster pace is basically the dream for most Open Source efforts. There's nothing for anyone to be ashamed about from that model, it's good for Open Source to be funded by the players who are most invested in having a really good industry standard available to everyone.
The point being these are snowflake projects, only kept running thanks to some companies pay checks, the large majority of Linux users pays zero anything for desktop software.
Donations and patreon like schemes hardly allow to pay for a mortgage, supermarket, healthcare, transport every single month.
> only kept running thanks to some companies pay checks
I don't understand what you're getting at.
You're arguing that user donations and patreon schemes don't pay enough, but there's something wrong with Blender being funded by the companies that use it?
The companies paying for Blender are a substantial portion of the community. They're funding a common resource that all of them share, and that common resource is being made available to everyone, decreasing the barriers of entry for new talent to get into 3D modeling, increasing the quality of potential hires they can bring on because of its wide availability, providing a common target for addons and tutorials, and providing those same studios with a Libre base that they can build on top of if they need to. This is exactly what is supposed to happen in Open Source, people pay for it because it's a common resource that they care about. That's why companies are investing into it.
What is the funding model for Open Source that you consider legitimate? Pulling in enough money to full-time hire an entire development team doesn't count because you don't like the primary user base? Pretty much everything that Blender is doing here is a success and more Open Source projects should be looking at their governance model and learning from it.
I don't understand a viewpoint that says that Patreon and individual-funded projects are uncompetitive and unsustainable, but also that corporate-funded projects with large donors don't "count" as Open Source success stories. It feels to me like you're defining Open Source as a project with zero funding, and then complaining that it has zero funding. Is Matrix a snowflake project? Is Krita? Is Linux itself?
And anyway, all of this ignores the facts that:
A) Even outside of corporate donations that make the majority of its funding, Blender has also been comparatively way more successful than other OS projects at getting individual user donations (I even donate to Blender just as an individual), because they approach PR and community in a really smart, engaging way that drives enthusiasm. And
B) Blender's funding model has nothing to do with the original thing this thread was talking about, which was just that FLOSS software can be of comparable or better quality than its commercial alternatives. You're kind of jumping around, from first arguing that Blender doesn't count because it started as commercial software, and now arguing that Blender doesn't count because it has funding and that's not typical for other projects.
If FLOSS software overall can pull off commercial competitiveness in many cases underfunded, that's almost more impressive. Imagine how good the Open Source ecosystem would be if we as individual and corporate communities started funding more stuff to the same level as we fund Blender.
If the companies sponsoring Blender, many of which already customers from the commercial days, withdraw their support tomorrow, in a couple of years Blender will turn into another Gimp, as everyone switch to something else to pay their bills.
What I learned from my zealot FOSS days, is that trying to sell FOSS desktop or developer tools is hardly any different from trying to make a living as street musician.
It is cool for a while, eventually it turns into survival, as bitter Winter arrives.
> If the companies sponsoring Blender, many of which already customers from the commercial days, withdraw their support tomorrow, in a couple of years Blender will turn into another Gimp, as everyone switch to something else to pay their bills.
And if the companies buying Slack suddenly stop buying Slack, it will also die. The observation that all software development requires an investment of resources is not a FLOSS-specific observation, and it's not particularly relevant to the conversation about whether FLOSS software is regularly competitive with proprietary alternatives.
It's not really an insight to say that if you starve developers they'll stop developing. We all know that already. And it's also true of every commercial product. When a community switches to another product, the original product withers because it lacks support. That is a correct observation, but what does that have to do with FLOSS? That's just a general principle that applies to everyone.
I don't see you arguing that Slack doesn't count as a competitive product because most of its individual users and small communities use the free version, and some day the big corporations it relies on for the bulk of its revenue might switch to Matrix/Element instead.
> many of which already customers from the commercial days
This is also just not true. Blender's current funding exists because they put in the work to get completely new grants and investments from major game studios like Epic, Ubisoft, Steam, and Microsoft, as well as from hardware manufacturers like NVidia and AMD. Blender's funding has solidly increased from its early days.
Blender is not just sailing on its previous commercial support from its previous commercial days. It didn't get grants in those days, companies generally don't give massive no-strings-attached grants to commercial products. Modern-day Blender has greatly expanded the support it has because the people managing its funding/organization are very smart and have put a metric ton of work into understanding and innovating on existing Open Source PR and community management models.
This is part of why Open Source maintainers and organizers should be paying so much attention to what Blender does, because it is genuinely doing an excellent job selling the idea of a community-supported Open Source standard to large companies.
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Stepping outside of the conversation, just to reiterate one more time: the fact that FLOSS tools are regularly competitive despite receiving on average much less support than their proprietary alternatives is a sign that there is something very cost-efficient about the FLOSS development model, and that pumping more funding into it might be a better use of resources than buying commercial products.
You can argue all you want that Open Source is not sustainable, but there are still a lot of Open Source projects that are of competitive levels of quality compared to their proprietary alternatives.
Could the funding situation be better? Yes. Does the funding situation mean that those projects somehow don't exist, or that they're not currently of comparable quality to their commercial alternatives? No.
It's getting pretty hard to manage for me, the poor maintainer :-). We've always put all our income into paying for development (and hardware, and sprints), so right now on Saturdays I'm being my own secretary/HR person/admin person. It used to be that my Saturdays were for bug triaging...
Be careful of burnout, Krita is wonderful, and I think the community would far prefer a slightly slower pace of dev if it means that the lifestyle is sustainable for you.
Now admittedly it's a little weird since it's basically the underlying software that powers a commercial paid variant (MixBus), but it always had been FOSS from the beginning.
