Hmm I’m not sure if this is solid parametric CAD. It let me draw a rectangle and then extrude that giving a zero-width tube… There doesn’t seem to be any way to add dimensions either.

Definitely loads quickly though and feels snappy. But for actually getting stuff done FreeCAD is definitely the best FOSS option at the moment.

Well… isn’t it? If one’s daily or most frequent back-and-forth journeys don’t exceed 100 ㎞, then a 160 ㎞ range is indeed fine.

Uhm… No. Most people only have one car so if you get one that only works 95% if the time it’s going to be super inconvenient when you have to hire a car every time you go on holiday or visit your family or go to a distant concert or whatever.

That’s why low range electric cars are not very popular.

Because most users simply use the browser

This is the same problem as saying “an electric car with 100 mile range is totally fine because most journeys are well under 100 miles”.

Most of the time I’m only using a browser (or VSCode). The annoying thing is the 1% of times when I want to print something, create a shortcut, use bluetooth headphones, configure a static IP, etc.

Use Photopea instead. It’s practically a copy-paste of Photoshop but in the browser, created by one person. Or if one has never used Photoshop before, try GIMP first.

Saying Photopea or GIMP is “practically a copy-paste of Photoshop” is laughable. Paint.NET, maybe.

No, I said that some important features don’t exist. They said “well I don’t use them”, as if that somehow negated the point that they don’t exist. It’s typical “works for me” nonsense. You get these replies whenever anyone says anything is suboptimal about Linux. It’s so tedious.

Good for you I guess?

These are probably the biggest reasons, but I think even after literally decades of development the actual desktop is still far behind Windows XP in many respects.

For example today I wanted to add a “start menu” shortcut to a program I had downloaded. The most popular answer is to *manually create a .desktop file and copy it to some obscure dot directory! Hilarious. Even Windows 3.1 had a built-in GUI for this.

Ok so there is a GUI to do it, but it isn’t actually integrated into desktops and isn’t installed by default. You have to install it separately.

It’s the same for things like WiFi settings! There are some settings in GNOME but most are hidden in the third party nm-connection-editor (from memory) and of course GNOME doesn’t have an “advanced settings” button to open that.

There are so many of these paper cuts I think Linux would be quite a frustrating experience for many people even if if had Windows-level hardware support.

I also can’t see this changing any time soon. Not that many Linux devs actually care about this sort of thing and many of them don’t even understand that it is a problem in the first place. Cue replies.

I used to use a separate Git client but it feels really clunky after using VSCode / Git Graph. I think this stuff really needs to be built in to your IDE to get the most use out of it.

(Not that I think VSCode/Git Graph are the pinnacle of Git GUIs. VSCode’s git support is kind of janky and Git Graph is unfortunately abandoned and not fully open source.)

Sure… I mean why are you wary of them because they work with the US military?

It’s been a while since I’ve made a PCB so I can’t remember what Horizon / Designspark PCB do, but this is a solved problem.

When do you push the net and when do you merge the net? Does dragging a net label connected to a net to intentionally attach it to a second net to connect the two not work due to pushing?

You merge nets when the user explicitly connects them (i.e. they are drawing a net and they click on another net).

I like how Simulink does this best - they fade wires when they cross without connecting - looks nice and makes connections obvious.

https://microcontrollerslab.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20-single-scope.jpg

I mean in schematics. You can absolutely short two lines together.

Ha ok well that’s crazy too. But obviously there’s a sane way to do it where wires do stay connected but nets don’t automatically merge just by moving components.

I meant in the schematic. You can’t get shorts there.

The one thing that I don’t like about KiCAD is that some shortcuts don’t have an alternative right click or toolbar menu item, which makes them undiscoverable unless you browse shortcuts.

Yes this is exactly the sort of thing I mean. Unfortunately the developers are unwilling to accept that these UX issues are really issues.

Though I can’t tell if they have reusable footprints and are able to simply reference them to a schematic symbol which is one of the nice things in KiCAD over altium

Wow, I’ve never used Altium but surely you don’t need to remake the SOIC8 footprint (or whatever) for every SOIC8 component? Even Designspark PCB doesn’t make you do that. Or did you mean something else?

due to their support of the US military

What?

I find the git CLI pretty intuitive

You might be the first person to ever say that! How do I delete a remote branch?

I haven’t used it for a very long time but IIRC if you drag a component in the schematic view, by default it leaves all the wires behind!

I also recall they have a super confusing file format (a .pretty directory or something? Wtf is that?). I note that LibrePCB claims one of its features is a sane file format, presumably in response to that.

The documentation looks excellent!

I’m definitely going to try this for my next PCB project. I’ve tried basically all of the other free options (Designspark PCB, Eagle, Kicad, Geda, Horizon) and Horizon is the only one really worth using IMO (Designspark PCB is also decent).

Eagle and Geda are trash. Don’t waste your time.

Kicad should be great, but they’ve made a number of insane UX decisions that make it really unusable in practice. Horizon is actually based on the pretty good Kicad engine but it fixes most of the UX mess.

Still better than Device Tree though right?

that they would disclose on their website

Wouldn’t it make more sense then for them to simply host the Flatpak themselves? I kind of thought that was the whole idea of Flatpak.

What would they sign it with? How do you verify the signature?

Yeah just encode the files locally and rsync them to the server. You could even use a Makefile to do the conversation.

It doesn’t work fine for what it is. People use Bash for scripting all the time and it’s full of footguns and gotchas. Powershell is just an attempt at a sane shell. It’s not meant to be a full general purpose language like Python; it doesn’t make sense to equate them.

Personally I don’t really like the style of Powershell. The structured data is very obviously a good thing but I don’t really like the syntax. Nushell seems a lot nicer IMO.