Re: SolidWorks is cool, sort of (but FreeCAD might be better)

On 6/21/2025 12:50 AM, piglet wrote:

Would you entrust mission-critical business operations to obsolete,
unsupported software?

 Far more than I’d trust the ever changing buggy offerings of
Adobe/Microsoft/etc .

There's nothing wrong with "buggy" -- if you are aware of the bugs,
how they potentially impact your usage AND have viable work-arounds.
The "ever-changing" is the pisser; it complicates KNOWING what you
have in your hands.

Banking finds COBOL works just fine. I know some
major pharmaceutical plants still run critical processes on HP1000-21MX
minicomputers from the 1970s!

These are industries where there is little change.  So, over
time, all of the quirks will surface, be recognized and addressed.
[Pharma, in particular, makes change costly by necessitating re-validation]
Where you run a risk is using some "legacy" (polite term for "unsupported")
tool in a NEW way; one for which you have no actual knowledge of its
performance.  Worse, EXPECTING it to perform comparable to the other
uses to which it has been successfully applied.
E.g., a tool that can handle thru-hole PCB layout might fail miserably when
tasked with an SMT application.
My first application of AutoCAD's AME (~1986?) worked fine building 3D
models.  *UNTIL* I tried to model a perforated enclosure!  The number and
proximity of the holes "subtracted" from the enclosure skin solid tickled
a bug in the floating point implementation -- in a very obvious (incorrect)
way!  Had I not attempted that task, the consequences of the FP problem
might not have been as (visibly) apparent.  Perhaps two parts might not
have fit together properly, etc.
[It was REALLY easy to provide a test case to the folks at AutoDesk so
there was no fussing about whether or not this was a genuine bug or "OE".]