I suspect it might be easier to teach high school students. You get them younger and they don’t know no better. Fewer things to unlearn. But the skill gaps can be eye opening for sure. I’m old as dirt. I got my feeble tech start in front of a printer terminal-- we didn’t have such things as monitors. I don’t think I saw my first DOS prompt until I was maybe 19 or 20. But we stilled played Oregon Trail and some Space Invader game. And we loved it!

And the first rule of KDE is “There is ALWAYS a widget!”

As a “boomer” myself, I do know the secret of the ‘right click: Save as’. Who do you think thought up the idea-- that’s right, a Boomer. And we taught Gen X about it. Not my fault they didn’t pass on the ancient and now arcane knowledge to future generations. But I suppose you need to know how to use a mouse before you can right click anything. Having attempted to teach 3D CAD to high school students, my first job was to show them how to use a mouse and why fingers and CAD don’t mix. And do it before we could actually move on to the subject matter they were supposed to be learning.

Still I do use an app for rotate my backgrounds and quotes. The app Variety works well with KDE Plasma with a large selection of repositories to choose from with beautiful backgrounds without taking up extra space on my drives. But what do I know, I’m just a boomer.

I do enjoy all the NASA photos and National Geographic backgrounds served up to me on a rotating basis without needing to take up local storage space to do so. But I ain’t running Windows either.

It’s actually not. Tesla just won’t care until the feds sue them in court for it.

The data on that is all there. Records like car fatalities are collected mainly through law enforcement reports and states have registration numbers. But the question is, how centralized is the data? City, county, state, or federal? There is a lot of data that simply isn’t required to be collected to a central agency to keep track of.

Tesla’s do cost more to insure than ‘average’ cars. But, that extra cost reflects more the cost to repair minor/moderate damage than cost of fatalities. Since fatalities are just a smaller subset accidents. Tesla’s are extremely costly to repair and often get totaled vs repaired. Premiums reflect that cost of loss.

3% of 250 million could very well be the approximate number of cars on the roads that are involved in a fatal collision. And that is the only consideration of the article in this study.

So it’s a matter of personal choices rather than one of necessity. To be honest I do the same with some of the software that Fedora installs, (I don’t need a suite like OpenOffice-- Abbiword and gnumeric are all I really need anymore), and some very specialized programs I use that most people have no need of. But none that has little to do with not having productive and usable software populating your first time boot.

So nothing to really make Windows actually useful on reboot. In nearly the same amount of time with a Linux distro, you get a system that may well not need anything extra to be productive with on 1rst reboot.

(And yes, I have installed both OS systems from scratch dating back to dos).

Did you also get most of the extra software installed at the same time or did you need to spend extra time getting all your non-OS software installed to make your computer actually useful?

I never have an issue with people preferring a different CAD package over another. For example: I detest Fusion 360 for various reasons even after spending a year with it. We all have preferences, work requirements, and even “vibe” better with one package over the rest. You need to choose the tool that works best for you.

What I do have an issue with is new users that try and have problems and immediately start whinging that “FreeCAD isn’t like what I know. And it needs to be like my favorite” Those are the lazy people that can’t be bothered to learn something new. And they should either expend the effort to learn or go back to whatever they were using or volunteer to code, (it’s open source after all). FreeCAD ain’t for you.

But if you have given FreeCAD, (or ANYTHING new in life), an honest try and you can’t get the hang of it or simply don’t like it. Well, that’s a valid and very fair reason to not use it.

Been there done that. Got the tee shirt.

While good support to customers is very valuable, trying to support a product that is decades old and shares nothing in common with current products is a plain waste of time energy and money.

It would require someone to search out all the documentation needed to make that one part, then you need to figure out the correct process to make said part, determine if you have material on hand or need to special order something, then try to find that one old jig/fixture needed amongst a building full of 100’s of such items for the right one. Then you need to be sure that the the complete fixture is there and nothing is worn out beyond use. Then you need to make time to insert this one-off semi-custom part into the manufacturing process.

By the time you do all this, that one 20 year old obsolete part will have perhaps cost you thousands of dollars and you still haven’t made the first piece of swarf. Imagine the shock and surprise that customer would have when they get the bill that accurately reflects the true cost.

Then it’s a habit not a fear. I also am comfortable with the cli since I started with Linux back at RedHat 5 and Mandrake 6. It was learn it or die in those days. But as time has passed, I find myself using it less and less because I don’t really need it everyday. But while I might need to google a specific command because I forgot it, I still remember it’s possible and handy.

No it’s not. Unlearning old habits and thought processes is always the first step in learning new things. But to be fair, it’s also the most difficult part.

While other CAD packages do have a better failure path to follow, they still can fail at the same points as FreeCAD. And you still really should be following best practices for ANY CAD package to avoid failures. But people are nothing if not lazy. And fillets and chamfers just suck in any CAD package. It’s always been my practice to never add them until I was done with the modeling. And if major changes where needed, I would remove them if I suspected they could even remotely cause an issue during a change to a model.

You just want to be angry and complain about something don’t you. Either get over it and learn to use FreeCAD or don’t. But whinging is unproductive and useless.

They still have somethings to cleanup and tweak to make the guessing better and more reliable. But it’s on it’s way for sure.

Why does it surprise you much that FreeCAD isn’t like SW? And why do you think it should be?

For daily use, you don’t need the command line. Only in fairly rare instances do you need to resort to it when things go wrong. And those commands are a mere google away. So don’t let the that big bad scary terminal stand in your way. It’s not the stumbling block you think it is.

You can say you have put in the effort to learn it and the effort doesn’t pay off for you. It happens and is nothing to be ashamed of. But the blunt truth is the majority do NOT want to learn anything new because change is scary and simply want to complain about the tiniest difference. If I had a nickle for every time I’ve tried to help someone with FreeCad and they start complaining how FreeCAD isn’t like Fusion360 and why isn’t it, I probably could afford that SW license. No shit, It ain’t Fusion.

There’s a huge difference between a CAD package that has had millions of dollars and multiple development teams spent on it to polish and tweak it into perfection and a small team of volunteers that are working in their basements and backyards for free so they can give it away for free. Why would you be surprised and upset that it can be chaotic and janky. Your choice is to either continue to climb that mountain to master FreeCAD or to move on to something that does make you happy. To quote that famous puppet, " Either do or do not. There is no try"

I will tell you that any CAD package is simply a tool-- a means to an end and not the end itself. And if the tool doesn’t work for YOU after giving it a good try, don’t use that tool. I will also say that despite enjoying the sackcloth and ashes of FreeCAD, I would never recommend it for professional use. It’s not ready for prime time. There are better tools out there for that field of battle. But that doesn’t mean FreeCAD is not a useful tool and can do a lot of impressive things if you wish to spent the effort.

They struggle with FeeCAD for the same reason they struggle with ANY little change in software-- they simply don’t want to be bothered to learn something new. It’s called being lazy.

And there is little to nothing to fear. The big bad terminal and command line isn’t needed for day to day use anymore. It’s been years since the last time I needed to compile anything. And if I ever do need to do that again, something is definitely wrong.