Hi there & cheers,
I thought I’d give FreeCAD a spin to see how (or if at all) it could be used for Architecture/BIM modelling. OSS is not a new topic for me. Whenever possible, I try to avoid a vendor lock-in (and so far it did pay off or I am/was painfully reminded when a vendor managed to lock me in).
So it’s Gimp, Inkscape, LibreOffice instead of their commercial counterparts whenever possible.
While I lack the skills to help out with programming itself, I thought at least some feedback could be useful. As a new user I may lack lots of things, but then again in my experience it is this unspoiled “white paper” that can give a project good feedback, when most of the experienced staff went “project blind” already. 
So I like Revit, but their subscription licensing model is unsustainable for me, so looking for alternatives. Long term alternatives…
For now I’m still in the usability evaluation phase, i.e. determining if FreeCAD is usable at all. I mean it evidently must be (for some) as I see great projects made with it already. For me, after installing 0.18.4 and then the AppImage it’s still
Traceback (most recent call last):
Crash time … most of the time. So trying to get a grip on that and aproaching the usability eval with a good share of benevolence.
Will try to read here as much as possible to provide Feedback “in the apropriate way”, although my 1st feedback would be that there’s a large pile of boilerplate that’s being thrown at the user as requests/warnings what to do before providing feedback. I do suspect that some users may be intimidated by that or simply scoff at it. In any case while I understand the need to filter Feedback, the current filter setting might be too stern.
So:
DWG import. 0.18.4 works, albeit with scaling problems
0.19dev
17:04:41 Converting: “/usr/bin/oda-file-converter” “/path/foobar/anonymous” “/tmp/tmppdlv2xmv” “ACAD2000” “DXF” “0” “1” “xxx.dwg”
17:04:41 Conversion successful
17:04:41 Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 1, in
File “/tmp/.mount_FreeCAk8BnpN/usr/Mod/Draft/importDWG.py”, line 108, in insert
doc = importDXF.insert(dxf, docname)
File “/tmp/.mount_FreeCAk8BnpN/usr/Mod/Draft/importDXF.py”, line 2817, in insert
Import.readDXF(filename)
<class ‘RuntimeError’>: BRep_API: command not done
Hmm. Could be the AppImage FS kludge-something. Well, at least the AddOn manager works in 0.19dev, because
in 0.18.4
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/freecad/Mod/AddonManager/addonmanager_macro.py", line 147, in fill_details_from_wiki
code = code.replace(b'\xc2\xa0'.decode("utf-8"), ' ')
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'replace'
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/freecad/Mod/AddonManager/AddonManager.py", line 852, in run
self.macro.fill_details_from_wiki(url)
File "/usr/lib/freecad/Mod/AddonManager/addonmanager_macro.py", line 149, in fill_details_from_wiki
FreeCAD.Console.PrintWarning(translate("AddonsInstaller", "Unable to clean macro code: ") + code + '\n')
TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "list") to str
Killed
¯_(ツ)_/¯
While we’re at the financially unsustainable subscription model. I recently heard Qt wants to establish something similar.
If so, I certainly hope they use the surplus money to fix HiDPI scaling. FreeCAD, as many other Qt apps, constantly gets it wrong on my 4k screen.
e.g. the AppImage looks quite ok (proportionally-wise), but way too big. What FreeCAD thinks are 32px icons looks more like 128x128 paintings.
QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1 FreeCAD_0.19-23058-Linux-Conda_glibc2.12-x86_64.AppImage
and setting them to 16px makes the UI a little bit more bearable. I suppose one can live with this hack, but