It’s been a year or two since I played with OSS CAD/CAM. It was still heavily lacking. QCad is only 2d.

I check it every few years hoping for improvement.

FreeCAD UI was still so bad it was basically unusable and I could not wrap my head around it. Horrible interface and totally unintuitive. I’m still not sure how to take a simple linear measurement. Installed a plugin that sort of worked to measure. That crap was designed by aliens.

The OSS CAMs can generate a tool path, but it is difficult and they aren’t feature rich. CNC programming puts food on my table and I need the speed and features of pro level software. If I was playing with a router and doing a lot of 2d stuff, I could make it work for that. Especially if my time didn’t matter.

If Mastercam would just port to Linux I would happily switch.

I’m a CNC programmer with enough computer programming knowledge to be dangerous but not actually contribute to the various projects out there. Sucks.

I’ll have to throw qalculate on my computer and play with it. I’m actually rebuilding our new little farm right now and am taking a break from machining while I put our home right. If our savings hold out, I’ll be building my own shop.