I was required to use solidworks for my degree. I don’t think I got more than 5 minutes at a time without a crash, and sometimes pressing the save button caused the crash (and it didn’t save).
I’ve been following the development of FreeCAD. The tutorials look great on the latest versions but I can’t get my head around the interface after AutoCAD. There are some steps I just get stuck.
I struggled switching to FreeCAD initially for sure, but it was worth it. Today the state of things is much much better and there are fewer compromises to making the switch. Overall I’d say go for it.
You can tell a keyboard has been used for Solidworks, the letters will be worn off the “ctrl” and “S” keys.
I always found this ironic, it’s neither “solid” nor it “works” ^^
It’s one of those programs that was initially very good and the developers genuinely cared about making it the best in the industry, but over time became a de-facto standard and therefore they don’t need to actually make it good any more. People are still going to use it whether they put in effort or not, so they can enshittify as much as they want, to a point.
Same issue as Adobe, but they’re starting to feel the consequences of that, with a bunch of companies offering cheaper or free alternatives to some Adobe products, that are commonly used in the industry now (things like DaVinci Resolve, Affinity suite, Photopea).
SW causes me to rage, but at least for the most part they aren’t actively making it worse. Seems to be the same busted garbage it’s always been for the last decade.
Forget who watches the watchers. Who crashes the crash loggers?
Quis frangit ipsos fragores?
Huh, I’ve been using the educational version of Solidworks for the past 10-ish years and have not had that experience.
It’s always worked fine for me. Worked on my 7 or 8 year old desktop computer running Windows 7 and then 10. And works on my new Win 11 desktop.
I use it almost daily for designing 3D printed parts and stuff to cut on my CNC machine.
Here’s a bird carrying case I designed last night in about 4 hours. I have more work to do, but I feel like I am over the hump on the design.
My only bitch is the newest version required Win 11. Other than that I have been happy with it. I am getting it for US$20/year as a veteran.
It’s definitely well worth the $20 you spent, but it’s wild to me you managed to make that without running into any problems. We have a group chat at work dedicated to ranting about SW issues that never stays silent for a full 24 hours.
That’s really unfortunate. I use CATIA at work, and I used to have so many issues with it. Well, I had one issue with it that occurred all the time. I would get the “Click OK to Terminate” problem where you could only click it and it closed and I lost everything since my last save.
That issue turned out to be a Dell video driver. Back to Solidworks - I have had it unexpectedly close on me 3 or 4 times in the past year. I think that is good based on my CATIA experience.
Reporting an error in one of those dialogs and having it help anyone is probably less common than winning a billion dollar jackpot. There’s a pretty high chance it will fail to even say it worked, like we see here, in my experience.
I’ve tried opting out of a Yahoo Fantasy league email list a dozen times and the opt out page always says “over capacity” and doesn’t work.
Better than a couple of ones I get where the subdomain won’t load at all. I create an email rule to auto-delete those, but they are fucking annoying.
For a long time I was getting a notification monthly from eBay that I had a negative four dollar balance. I couldn’t opt out or stop them because that account had been turned off. THAT’S a fucking annoying catch-22, too. lol
