I didn't know that there was a FreeCAD Day! But I'll take this opportunity to just give thanks to the FreeCAD developers for creating and sustaining an amazing program. We all know it's not perfect, but it's already incredibly powerful and I'm now using it professionally in place of SolidWorks. Not only do I save a ton of money, I feel way more in control of my work, and have ownership of my hard-earned skills. I can write my own Python routines to automate parametric modelling and use FreeCAD as a back-end for doing geometric calculations. It's fantastic and I'm grateful for it.
Thank you.
I do not want to sound negative towards something that is a gift but when I tried to use it in place of SW and it is so far behind from a practical point of view.
Have you used Catia before? I used to think Catia was the dumbest CAD package ever. After being forced to use it for about a year, I honestly get why they’re made that way now. And dare I say, Catia is actually a pretty good CAD package. (I’ve lived and breathed solidworks for about a decade, used and trained in Creo, Inventor, and now Catia). I think FreeCAD is modeled (pun intended) to be more like Catia hence why it feels so far behind.
(Not GP) I've never used Catia and I'm not in mech eng, but to me FreeCAD seems like an MVP Fusion360 clone inexplicably made with a '90s GUI toolkit.
I'm glad it exists, and appreciate the herculean task that it is, it's just a shame, and it really is clunky/unintuitive compared to F360. Personally I think some focus on UI & polish would go a long way, drive more adoption, which is presumably somewhere on the long road to more support in development and funding.
I get the impression it's probably made by and for a few though, scratching an itch and not too bothered about adoption. Even among hobbyists it seems to be a fairly uncommon choice - pick a Youtube channel and it's usually Fusion360 I find (and as far as I've seen not sponsored, unlike Altium Designer say which is an even weirder (more limited/expensive) choice for a hobbyist).
As a hobbyist I can't imagine using anything but OpenSCAD. I know it's not comparable in capabilities and has its quirks, but it feels like Python for CAD - I get stuff done quick. It's so simple the cheatsheet covering 100% of commands takes up one page, so I don't need to waste time looking up details. And as it's all code it spares me from clicking through all kinds of menus.
I do miss FreeCAD's chamfer & fillet tools, though.
You might be interested in CadQuery: