Really sad to hear this, I just found out about Ondsel recently. Glad to hear FreeCAD is getting their merges, but I really would have liked to see Ondsel find a market all its own.

I had mixed feelings about the whole Ondsel thing. And, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Most of the significant features in 1.0, that supposedly came from Ondsel, are things that I've been using for perhaps 3 years now, with a fairly well known branch of FreeCAD called Linkstage3 by a user that goes by RealThunder.

I don't know how much he was involved in Ondsel, or the merging of those features into FreeCAD, but it sure looked like a whole lot of great work wasn't credited to mind boggling amount of work by one person.

I still use the Linkstage3 branch, because it has a lot more features still, than what was present in the 1.0 pre-release i tried some months ago. Maybe things have changed since then.

legends

When I started using SOLIDWORKS I had 0 training, still managed to make it work. FreeCAD is still frustrating after a lot of effort. But I keep trying, because it's the only real open source option

Well or use the forums. They have a wonderfully helpful community

We got GIMP 3 and FreeCAD 1 before we got GTA VI

And Inkscape 1.4!

I kinda want to try it out just as a hobby, is it decent or should I look elsewhere?

tbh... I like it more than OnShape, but I also just use it as a hobby for 3dprinting.

It's still... Difficult if you're used to commercial CAD suites, but it's leagues better than it used to be

most of them are merged in FC, and they will still continue contributing.

Oddly, despite the 1,000's of hours of SW myself, I had little difficulty in picking up FreeCAD. Or Fusion or OnShape, (even taught OnShape to high school students), or SolidEdge. Once you understand the design process of CAD, it's not all that hard. I do have preferences in UI's and workflows, but that doesn't mean I can't use something different.

If you want the best tutorials on FreeCAD, check out mangojelly on youtube. He has a current 1.0 beginner series that starts right from the very beginning. And he goes slow enough to easily follow along.

Ignore the huge number of workbenches. You can even go to the Settings and turn the ones you don't need off so you never see them again. You are only going to use 2 workbenches 90% of the time-- Part Design and Sketcher. And as you get more experience, you might add another couple of workbenches as you go. Most of the third party workbenches are specialty things. For example, I sometimes need to design and make gears or do small sheetmetal work. So I have the Gear and sheetmetal workbenchs installed. You probably would never need it.

Learning CAD, no matter what flavor, does require effort. It's as much about learning how to think as it is about learning how to do.

I find the opposite. There's so many videos on FreeCAD its wonderful. And if you're stuck, ive posted to the forums and within a week someone literally took my file and made a video showing how to do what I couldn't figure out.

Such a fantastic community.

yes

In a past career, I was a mechanical design engineer; I've probably spent 10,000 hours of my life in SolidWorks. Not once did I feel like a 3d mouse would speed me up or otherwise solve my problems. I trialed a spacepilot for several months and just couldn't be arsed after awhile. What do others get out of them?

I work as an architectural designer but I've never really been allowed to use anything other than Revit for BIM workflows. Our consultants basically only use Revit or Autodesk products, so our hands are kind of tied for projects where we need to collaborate.

My boss uses Vectorworks for our small projects that don't need BIM, I might suggest we switch to Libre or FreeCAD so that we all have access without needed another VW license. Do you enjoy using LibreCAD?

There is already OpenTheme, which you can install via the AdonManager... looks waaaay better than the default

0.8, 0.9, etc...