My first home computer was a “286” a friend of mine built for me back in 1987. Not long after that I acquired a bootleg copy of Autocad for DOS. It was great designing HO model railroad stuff on the computer. I even had an early pen plotter that took 11 x 17 paper. I had to change pens manually, but I could make paper drawings in color!
Unfortunately, technology accelerated very fast in those days. Windows 95 came along and my Autocad program was soon obsolete along with the pen plotter.
I remember being very frustrated with those early versions of Windows. Programs left a lot to be desired and then there was the “blue screen of death!”
I tried an early distro of Linux – Suse. When it worked it was great, but when it didn’t my poor little brain did not compute! I gave up on it and went back to windows for a bunch of years.
I kept looking for a simple CAD program so I could draw 2d parts. The real world of design was embracing 3d CAD. The simple (cheap or free) CAD programs were either too simple or geared towards architecture or were impossible to learn.
About ten years ago I had the opportunity to purchase a second hand Mac Pro. I loved it! Bye bye Windows. However, the Mac got old and it was soon apparent, the firmware would not let me upgrade the OS past version 10.7.5. It was not long before I could not even get on the internet because even Firefox would not support the aging operating system.
I retired in 2015. A new Mac Pro was expensive! So I looked at Linux again. The early bugs are mostly gone and most of the distros work great. There is sophisticated open source software to do almost anything that can be done in Windows or on a Mac. So I am happily using Ubuntu 18.04 on a System 76 machine build to optimize the Linux OS.
This week, I really needed to make a simple 2d CAD drawing. So I googled “open source CAD for Linux.” There are lots of programs to choose from and many reviews guiding a user through all the different options.
The first program I tried was FreeCad. It looks pretty impressive, but after trying to draw my simple drawing it became apparent it was going to be a very hard learning curve. No polar coordinates in the “sketcher” module and to create a mid-point, I had to construct it rather than hitting a button!
The second program I installed is the free version of Qcad. OMG, it works just like the old Autocad for DOS!!! I made my drawing in less than an hour without looking at any tutorials or help screens. I love it!
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