The other week I was at a Solidworks event and I remember distinctly thinking at the time "wow this user interface is good". People could just get stuff done quickly without having to constantly fight the user interface. As a FreeCAD user I was thinking that people who used Solidworks were "spoiled" by having such a nice GUI.

Fast forward to this week and I have needed to make a spare part that has some curvature in it. I was thinking "ok I just need a couple of sketches and a couple of pads and then some screw holes and it's all done". Fast forward 2 hours and I'm writing this rant blog post because for over an hour I ran into some bug that was causing the "wire is not closed" error message to pop up from my sketch. Yes I'd check that the endpoints were constrained, yes I used the verify sketch thing. But what would happen is that in part of the curve some computation was making two points not match by some really small epsilon amount. This might have been some sort of floating point comparison bug. In any case it was preventing me from making the pad I needed. I finally battled through the bugs and because the curvature doesn't quite match the other part, even though I imported external geometry to construct it, FreeCAD is complaining that there's more than one part. I was so frustrated that I gave up.

Once again I'm struck by just how much of a flaming pile of shit the FreeCAD user interface is. I've had this experience so many times over the last year, the worst part is that the user interface just never seems to get easier to use. There's always a huge amount of bullshit to deal with and it seems like no matter how much I use FreeCAD I always feel like I'm fighting the user interface rather than getting my work done.

I remember when I was learning Vim it was frustrating at first but became powerful later. Similar with learning Emacs, you had an initial annoying learning phase followed by huge amounts of productivity being enabled by the tool. Those tools aren't aimed at being beginner friendly but rather are aimed at being expert friendly. The frustration phase just never seems to stop with FreeCAD. More importantly though, despite using FreeCAD for a while I am yet to get that feeling of power like I did with Vim. I'd put up with some frustration if I felt I had a powerful tool to get things done, I've done this many times in my career. But if professionals who are battling through the user interface frustrations for months never get past the frustration phase it's a pretty clear sign that the user interface or the documentation or both suck.

This is a pity because FreeCAD could be a good piece of software that a lot of people could use, but the learning curve has to be the worst I've experienced for any piece of software in my entire career, and I've experienced a lot of frustrating software over the years. I've been doing a lot of 3d work lately so I have a very strong incentive to learn, I'd never have put up with this level of frustration without some strong external motivation driving me along. The GUI is so amazingly hideous that I think many people just give up on FreeCAD as a direct result. Honestly if you aren't using FreeCAD I'd highly recommend you don't start, at least until the user interface is improved. This might be one of the first times I've explicitly advised people to avoid something open source, generally I'm a big fan of open source software, but in this case if you actually need to get things done and you aren't already a FreeCAD expert it's probably a good idea to investigate alternatives.

All in all I just don't think FreeCAD is feasible for use in many professional settings. Its not bad for doing hobby projects but it doesn't seem commercially viable for working in teams yet. Far too much time seems to get eaten up by annoying bugs and the user interface makes it hard to get new team members up to speed on the software. It pains me to write this because I think FreeCAD has a lot of potential but it just doesn't seem there yet. As long as the new user experience is this bad I just can't see FreeCAD getting more widespread adoption.