FreeCAD Arch development news
I keep trying FreeCAD every 3-6 months, but it&#x27;s so full of little bugs and crashes it&#x27;s not really usable in my mind. I&#x27;m using the version from Debian unstable.<p>The UI is unstable (very easy to crash just by fiddling around), and the geometric kernel has a ton of little issues that you have to work around. At every new project I have the liberty of giving it a try without many constraints (no import&#x2F;export required, minimal assemblies of elementary geometry). I really wonder how can you actually go through the relatively complex projects I&#x27;ve seen as a tutorial, really. I would always give up after a dozen crashes.<p>I&#x27;ve used SolveSpace in at least 4 projects, and I absolutely love it. The UI is different than FreeCAD, but in a very positive way (after learning the basics, I genuinely prefer SolveSpace&#x27;s a dozen times!). It&#x27;s a bit sad that SolveSpace&#x27;s kernel is definitely inferior in terms of capability to FreeCAD (notably: no offsets and no chamfers!), but what is supported _is_ stable.  I cannot say the same in FreeCAD, where chamfers would sometimes cause degenerate geometry or downright crash. The only minor complaint in SolveSpace is that currently it&#x27;s not always obvious to see the construction tree, as it&#x27;s represented linearly.<p>I bought a copy of VariCAD that I use on linux. But while it&#x27;s certainly a capable CAD, I really don&#x27;t like the UI, and the parametric modeling is clunky at best.<p>I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s much more available in terms of parametric modeling on linux if we exclude prohibitive stuff like NX. I&#x27;d like to be proved wrong here.<p>I still think the best modeler I&#x27;ve ever used is still Rhino, a joy to work with. But while it supported parametric surfaces, it  didn&#x27;t really allow parametric modeling when I last used it.