Title basically.
One of my windows computers, which happens to be the one I happen to do the most CAD work on, can’t upgrade to windows 11 due to having an Ivy Bridge era Xenon (it’s an E5-1680 v2 for the curious, older used workstations are fantastic bang for the buck computers).
Switching to Linux on this computer has been in the cards for a while, but I hadn’t been in a hurry to do it. Looks like my hand might be getting forced…
Drop autodesk. I’ve got access to autodesk products as an educator, and I’ve used inventor for years, but I have only had FreeCAD on my system for months. I have not found myself being unable to do anything I could do in Inventor.
I’ve had issues with FreeCAD being less performant and freezing or crashing when trying to make more complex parts.
Fairly rare though and I’ve been able to work around it
Tbf even solidworks crashes when designing complex assemblies
As much as I hate AutoCAD, Fusion360 is the only option for serious modelling and fast prototyping.
In what context? I personally find NX and SpaceClaim to be as good or better in both of those aspects, buuuuuut no home gamer is going to be able to afford either.
While the tn issue is better, personally found I a lot better to not use external geometry at all and instead build my references wrt the base plane. At worst I have to change a sketch attachment, that and doing chamfers absolutely last has saved a ton of grief on some recent models. I hand sketch first, how I learned cad in the first place, that workflow seems to mesh well with it.
Still the odd crash here or there but I’m accepting of it.