BluewingFreeCAD 1.1 is out
Time to give it another try I guess. I used Fusion almost exclusively until I switched to Linux (and have also used Solidworks in the past), and I found freecad 1.0 to be an exercise in frustration.
I gave it a very solid shot, but after many hours messing with it and watching tutorials I decided to try Onshape instead. I was able to become comfortable and productive in Onshape in less than half the time it took me to lose my cool with freecad.
The 1.1 update looks to be addressing some of the pain points, so they seem to be on the right track. I hope they keep that momentum going.
I’ve been able to freely export .step files for anything I’ve made in Onshape. As another commenter said there are catches, like all your files are public if you’re using the free version and there are premium features that require payment. But it’s currently not locked down like it seemed Autodesk were preparing to do, where all your files live on their cloud only and can never be exported. For sure there is potential for the same enshittification with Onshape though, which is why I hope the freecad devs soldier on.
Also if you’re worried about your files being public, just name them with codes indecipherable to anyone but you. It doesn’t seem like the public file repository actually gets searched that much in general, and with a meaningless code the odds of someone finding and stealing a specific design are probably near zero.