For me, it’s CAD software. FreeCAD is trash (sorry, lovers). Fusion360 is honestly the best out there for free. The “almost there” app is Shapr3D, but fuck $40/m.
And yes I’ve tried all the others not listed here.
[…] FreeCAD is trash […]
What issues have you had? What features do you wish it had?
I wish the UI/UX wasn’t made by people who still live in 1995, as a major start.
Not OP, but FreeCAD auto-constraints in sketches are all over the place, and figuring out which constraint is a problem and selecting the right element in the UI is terrible.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but FreeCAD tells you when a constraint is redundant, and clicking on it highlights the respective constraint in the sketch:
[1]References
- Type: Screenshot. Publisher (Application): FreeCAD. Published (Version): “1.1.1”. Accessed: 2026-06-11T23:44Z.
The redundant constraint detection works pretty well and FreeCAD usually remove them.
The main issue for me is that certain auto-constraints will not work as they advertise on your cursor.
The biggest culprit for me is the coincident constraint.
Let’s say that you have two lines in a 90 degree corner. If you add a line in the middle of any of the two lines, the cursor shows you that it will add a coincident constraint. But when you create your line, the coincident constraint isn’t applied.
And the other thing for me is that navigating which part of a line (and which line) is selected is not intuitive and correcting or adding constraints to fully constraint the drawing is a wild goose chase.
[…] correcting or adding constraints to fully constraint the drawing is a wild goose chase.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by this. Could you elaborate?
[…] Let’s say that you have two lines in a 90 degree corner. If you add a line in the middle of any of the two lines, the cursor shows you that it will add a coincident constraint. But when you create your line, the coincident constraint isn’t applied. […]
What you’re describing sounds more like a bug to me. At any rate, I wasn’t able to confirm the behavior you described (maybe I’m misunderstanding you?):
[1]I was able to get both a symmetric constraint (green arrow), and a coincident constraint (red arrow) on the two 90 degree lines.
References
- Type: Screenshot. Publisher (Application): FreeCAD. Published (Version): “1.1.1”. Accessed: 2026-06-12T22:47Z.
Operating systems.
Windows is a collection of legacy code with trash strewn over top, but it is ubiquitous.
Apple’s offerings are typically decent and reliable, but the executives spent a lot of time lately kissing the ring.
Linux is simply not something I’m interested in supporting for my family.
I’d just like something that’s easy to use, common enough I don’t need to teach people to use it, secure by design, and not owned by an evil megacorp.
I’d just like something that’s easy to use, common enough I don’t need to teach people to use it, secure by design, and not owned by an evil megacorp.
Hey I don’t want to preach but if many people were able to learn how to use Chrome OS over the last decade they will be able to learn how to use the latest Ubuntu (or whatever flavor of Linux is now considered the most intuitive and fully featured for new users).
I believe Mint is the current “beginner edition” of Linux. Ubuntu has been getting a lot of hate lately from what I’ve seen.
My latest build is running Bazzite on an HTPC, but it’s still a project and not fully up and running quite yet.
Yeah no, one toe past extremely basic and you might end up in a quagmire of shit and googling usually makes things worse with misinformation.
Yeah that ring kissing rubs me.
You could always use HaikuOS (kidding) there’s ZERO evil behind that one!
Microsoft Exchange.
How many grandkids do you have? ;) ;)
How many competitors does it have that can do email, contacts, calendar, shared versions of the above items, and hybrid connect to exchange online.
I can’t think of a single option besides groupwise which is dead.
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I suggest:
Household Acoustic Notification Standard (HANS)
Where it’s a standard protocol or noise making system you can configure with some kind of device. Perhaps it also outlines LORA notifications as well.
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Resin printing slicing software.
There’s currently two main options, Lychee and ChituBox. I’ve only used Lychee (after giving up with Chitu) so I can only speak on that. Lychee has mostly everything I want in terms of features, but customization is very limited (ie keybinds, default behavior etc), and some aspects of the UI can be VERY clunky. And the best part: 90% of the features that you need to slice somewhat effectively are locked behind a paywall. They do offer a 30 day trial, so I have a backup file of all my settings, and every 30 days I make a new burner account.
It’s a nightmare compared to the plethora of slicing options available for filament printers.
Oh and it’s monthly too? That’s the worst. For CAD I only print something like once or twice per month. I cannot justify any cost monthly.
Have you tried any of the Elegoo.com products? I know nothing about resin printing, but they supposedly support it
My filament printer is actually from them. I have a love-hate relationship with that machine. It’s like, 20% stock at this point, and it isn’t the fastest or the cleanest printer out there, but it works well enough.
I’m not aware of a resin slicer made by them, but without doing the research, my guess would be that it’s relatively subpar. I haven’t been resin printing for terribly long, but once or twice a year I’ll go online to see if there is any discussion of better alternatives to Lychee or Chitu, and the conversation has always stayed the same. Everyone is in the same boat in that those two programs are the only really viable options, despite being… not great.
Krita!
Tried affinity.studio?
I really like photopea.
you can always pirate SolidWorks. its the best, and if you pirate it its completely free.
dassault only goes after businesses so feel free to pirate for personal use.
Word of caution on this, make dang sure you know exactly what you’re doing. Dassault systems has a reputation for tracking pirates down and billing out the ass, and that reputation doesn’t come from nowhere.
Still not saying not to pirate it, but do tread on very light waters.
Literally anything that you have to pay monthly for. I do not care what it is.
I have an old version of Sony Movie Studio Platinum that, legally, they still have to provide me a download for. But, holy absolute hell if they didn’t make it nearly impossible to just download the version I paid for. Of course, the new one is subscription only. Costs so much I’d have paid more in 3 months than the single one time payment I did for the old version a decade ago.
A really different approach to CAD is OpenSCAD. I was not happy with FreeCAD either.
Another mobile OS. Something that isn’t built entirely to exploit me.
I really liked my Jolla phone back in the days. I hope they make a good comeback.
I hear you. With Android turning into a closed OS like iOS later this year things are not looking very bright for people like me that uses alternative stores a lot.
I reccomend donating to postmarketos then. They do awsome work reverse engeeniering phones. Oneplus 6 is usable with pmos. Of course it has multiple problems but its nice seeing people make so much things for on old phones.
There are of course graphenos, calyxos, e/os/ of course. Unfortunatly the issue with every alternative os is that you need specific model of phone to even open bootloader.
Honestly, I would really fuck with a comprehensive Linux mobile experience. I know some things exist, but they aren’t yet fully rounded off. I say this now, but know damn well I’d tinker with something I shouldn’t and wind up needing to reinstall the OS like five times.
I’d be all over it. Hopefully we could get an open cellular modem with that at some point, too.
We do have some similar things, like Meshtastic for messages, but that’s just texting via radio. As far as calls go, it’s mostly also just radio for now.
Session tried to get a call and text system setup whereby anyone can host a node, similar to a TOR node, but their foundation didn’t reach the funding total. The work is done, but some services are gonna be scaled back a bit. There is definitely a considerable push for systems like that, but they’ll take a bit of time for implementation as it’d otherwise just be another company owned service that’s outside our control.
Tell me about it. Like Linux Phone hurry up!
I miss the FirefoxOS concept. Ahead of its time. Basically ran PWAs for everything.
Theres always e/os, iodeos, grapheneos and other forks
that is still android though
This might be controversial, but I want yet another code editor.
Hear me out, I write very little code, but often in widely different programming languages. Most of the time I write LaTeX and/or Typst all day, so I need:
- an editor that sandbox really well, there is no way I am trusting all my coding environment with my entire user space.
- an editor that don’t require much tinkering: if it can get to 80% there, I am welling to learn the rest, but I don’t want an editor that get 20% there and force me to pull 80 different package just to do things.
- preview LaTeX and Typst within the sandbox, ideally just in editor, so I don’t need to configure synctex.
- not controlled by a big tech like Microsoft.
So far, I am only able to find vscodium that is close to my desire, but it is still mostly controlled by Microsoft.
(ideally, self hosted) overleaf with texlive-full installed?
Social media app with circlejerk auto-hide would be Awesome. Would have to be politically agnostic.
That would just turn into a bunch of AI trying to figure out which kinds of dicks you like to jerk and which you don’t.
No, I said politically agnostic, and more than enough discussions are not circlejerks.
Sounds like you want to touch a bunch of limp dicks. I dunno if there is a filter for conversations about opinion topics that prohibit any opinions.
Excel. There are other options, sure, but excel is really hard to beat.
Email. Gmail really does it well. However, I have switched mostly to Proton, so maybe that’ll stick.
Yeah, excel really is hard to beat. Good one.
Re: email. Have you tried Port87?
Never heard of it.
Give it a try. :)
Pandas/Polars is all I need in a Jupyter notebook to replace Excel. Its not even a contest if you know some python for doing any real work.
I concede Excel has a lower bearer to entry for teams composed of mixed technical abilities.
So much this. If you find yourself writing nested formulas e.g.
=IF(A1>=90, "A", IF(A1>=80, "B", IF(A1>=70, "C", "F")))Do yourself a favour and switch to Python and Pandas. You can do so much more, so much faster, and so much simpler. And at the end of an your code, you can
pd.to_excel()to spit out your dataframe as an xlsx.Also duckdb. Realizing I could do
SELECT ... FROM 'arbitrary-file.xlsx'was a wondrous occasion
Anything closed where the update is “throw it away, buy the new model”. Industrial electronics, car stereo, any gen 1/old product.
Do you work on industrial electrical? Kinda curious about your comment there. The company I work for implements new systems, some of the biggest in the US, but we do plenty of maintenance, refurbishing, tuning, etc on some very very old systems. I’ve seen working equipment that is from the dawn of the 20th century, still going fine. Maybe we come in and install a new VFD on them, or recently we did a system running 2 setups of 8k amps @ 480V for motors that had gone through a whole entire fire that was so bad the roof collapsed.
Maybe it’s just the sector I’m in, which is steel and aluminum mills, but I’ve seen industrial be the one that does not want change because it comes with a high price tag. The sales guys need to convince these places that they can’t keep running everything on electrical equipment from the 70s to 90s
I don’t know why I said industrial. Just old nerdy junk, like a digital embroidery machine that needs xp to load designs. A media player locked in a similar situation. My car is 12 years old, gimme the source to the janky is on the head unit. Abandoned firmwares.
Most recently Amazon deprecated older Kindles for no apparent reason except the fact that they were still being in use for over a decade.
RCS messaging. The important bits are closed source so you have to use google services.
Yeah, Creative Suite era, before Creative Cloud. That for every Adobe product.
