FreeCAD or I will go back to my pencil, tee square and compass!

I have used AutoDesk products, (anyone remember starting AutoCad at a DOS prompt? I do), and Solid Works professionally. I have tried Fusion, OnShape, (taught a class to senior high school students for a few years), Solid Edge, and a host of lessor open source projects. All of them suck in some fashion. They are all waiting to trash your 100 hours of design sweat, (I got all the tee shirts). And if that’s the case, I’m not paying $50US a year for SW. I will wear the sackcloth and ashes of FreeCAD instead. At least it didn’t cost me anything to lose my work…

5 years of on and off trying and I still can’t make the doughnut in blender…

It’s still the same function at the base level-- to deliver and install/remove, in an easy manor, whatever software package the user wants to use/remove. Whether it’s a good system or not, is a separate issue.

Every Ubuntu based distro I’ve tested allows snaps. The highly touted beginner’s distro Linux Mint sure does. Even Fedora can use snaps and Ubuntu can use flatpaks if you want to be that silly. I have tested that both ways and it worked. But it was merely OKish. It’s just Ubuntu pushes snaps and Fedora pushes flatpaks. So snaps aren’t as insular as you seem to think.

For the user, there isn’t much difference between a snap, flatpak, deb, or rpm in use. The basic install or remove experience is meant to be the same, it’s supposed to be a carefully curated point and click. Even Gentoo’s portage is supposed to be simple for the user. The one other not quite as common, but a bit more universal installation method for users is the appImage package. I use several appImages because that’s the only way they are available. And personally, over the nearly 3 decades of fooling with Linux, I’ve had issues with all of the package management methods. I still have PTSD from being repeatedly caught in rpm hell back in the day or needing to compile from source. (Damn, I’m old)

The longer I use Linux, the more I think that whatever distro you choose, it’s more a matter of how you personally vibe with that distro than anything intrinsically better than the rest of them. Just about everything else is window dressing.

So basically, Ubuntu just with a different name and paint job. (I’ve used them both)

We are all at the most basic level, running pretty much the same kernel, one of the same small handful of desktop environments, and we choose from the same pool of software, (unless you need to get out into the weeds for a program on git hub). Everything else is either window dressing, (package mangers are window dressing-- they all do the same basic thing), or a choice on just how close to the bleeding edge we want to be, (rolling releases or immutable).

Celery is excellent that way. A peanut butter lover’s dream

No! CheezWiz with raisins or nothing! Just like my mother used to make.

My Acer Nitro with Aurora Says Hi!

(I’m thinking maybe going to Kinonite)

I’ve switched away from DDG after many years of use. I have gone to Ghostery Private search. It seems to be better for my search results with a lot less garbage mixed in.

I used to teach math in the local school. The kids had a great interest in 3D printing because I had a few fun items in my classroom that I had 3D printed. I decided to spend a couple of weeks teaching a bit of CAD through having the kids spend it designing a personalized key chain to print.

It took me 3 days of class time to teach them how to use a mouse…They couldn’t grasp the idea that a touch screen and CAD don’t go together, you need that mouse to make it work. It quickly became apparent that things quickly became difficult for them if it doesn’t have a touch screen.

And while some classes are always a bit better than others, there was always a noticeable number of them that struggled with using a mouse.