> FreeCAD recently got to 1.0 and is quite capable
FreeCAD is capable and is indeed free, but as a beginner designing something somewhat complex it really led me into building a rat's nest of a project that I found difficult to salvage. The rough edges and general flaky behavior did not help things, and I found almost none of the user interface intuitive. If I had to do it over again I'd choose F360 or Onshape.
The main problem with FreeCAD is that editing a dependency tends to break the entire rest of the model. So, if you want to edit a dimension or add geometry in a part made very early in the "stack", you're generally better off remaking the entire model with the other item as a base in another tab.
This is not a problem F360 shares, and that feature is what you pay for.
What you are referring to is the "Topological Naming Problem", where the names of faces changed after operations (because OCC, the CAD kernel, doesn't name them at all!), causing mapped features to move or break.
There were always workarounds that made it possible to do what you say: you could offset your sketches from base planes rather than attach them to generated geometry, and otherwise avoid using generated geometry by making use of parametrics.
Once you knew how it wasn't particularly onerous. For a couple of years of 0.20 and 0.21 I had no TNP-related breakage because of this.
(There could be some problems with assemblies that were a bit more challenging.)
However, this is now essentially a solved problem in 1.0. There's a high level of mitigation in a stable face-naming algorithm that keeps track of the changes OCC creates. There are still edge cases being reported, but the implementation works well. I've stopped worrying about applying the normal base-planes technique.
(There are still edge cases of TNP in other CAD packages, even those built on Parasolid, because it's a research-grade problem; once you think about it in depth, it can never be "solved". It can only be mitigated to the point where the package usually does what you would expect.)
You can now sketch on faces, edit dependencies, make Pads and sweeps from solid geometry edges as well as sketch edges, refer to generated geometry in sketches, and see the subsequent features stay where they should be.
So this "main problem with FreeCAD" is essentially in the past, as it has been for a long time in the RealThunder branch where the mitigations were originally developed.
Another "main problem" -- the lack of a core Assembly workbench -- is also addressed.
The final "main problem" of FreeCAD, IMO, is that OCC's implementations of fillet, chamfer and thickness are less capable than other modern CAD systems; there are limitations regarding thick fillets on thin edges, essentially. It might be possible to get these improved upstream, or it might not be, but there are other ways to get fillets into your design (such as adding them in the sketches, where arguably any "functional" fillet should be anyway).
If your priority is to use open-source software, FreeCAD does the job. But I basically always recommend AGAINST it for anyone who asks me that I consider a more "normal" user. Normal in the way that they don't share my masochistic tendencies to spend all sorts of time and efforts getting open source tools to work, fighting through quirks, poor UX, bugs, etc...
It seems to put off even people who are interested in learning CAD or are already familiar with CAD. It's telling that the best description people can come up with is "capable and free" instead of "easy to use".
It shouldn't, probably. Is it a bit rough around the edges? Yes it surely is. But 1.0 is pretty solid.
I don't know why it particularly needs to be the freely available thing that corners "easy to use", when Tinkercad does that admirably.
With a good introduction, you can get into it and really work on your own designs in a tool nobody can take away from you or nickel-and-dime out of your hands by varying the free offer. You can run it on all of your own hardware forever. And you will actually learn core things about CAD.
The community is good. There's an absolutely amazing number of good free tutorials now; the problem of bad tutorial material is a receding issue. I have not seen anything for Fusion 360 that even comes close to being as transparent, up-front, broadly educational, clickbait-free and informative as the Mango Jelly Solutions tutorials for FreeCAD.
I do consider it a lifestyle choice, still. But then so many creative things are open-ended, freely available/documented challenges, rather than easy. Many rich experiences do not have an easy entry point with early success.
I am a mostly very happy FreeCAD user. It is something that costs me no money but has allowed me to make tools unique to me that have changed my creative life forever.
All the same I'm about to pick up the Solidworks for Makers plan for a year, because I think it's always learning a thing from multiple different perspectives. I don't particularly expect to be swayed, but I do have future plans that involve being a bit more knowledgeable about the other packages. Solidworks is where I am going to start.
Workflows and UIs didn't really seem to change much to me, so I'd say the UX is still just as poor. I don't doubt they've made improvements under the hood and fixed bugs.
Many, many things have changed since 0.21. There's a radically improved UI themes system (and two new core themes as well as good support for OpenTheme).
There are pretty significant changes to the "fit" of the UI, better preference panels, but there are also significant improvements to UI and tooling in Sketcher, the TNP mitigations mean attaching sketches to surfaces is broadly as safe as it is in other CAD packages, you can directly extrude edge selections in Part Design, there is support (not enabled by default) for multiple separate solids in single bodies in Part Design, pretty major changes in the CAM workbench and architecture workbenches etc.
Most significantly in a workflow sense there's a new core Assembly workbench; combined with the TNP mitigations that is an enormous change.
The visuals of the UI improved, I noticed that, but that's not a UX improvement. Overall UX is the biggest issue, which to me, feels just the same as always.
Sketcher is considerably better, IMO -- it can do so much more. There's an integrated flow for Sketcher from Part workbench now, too.
(Gets even better in 1.1, too -- and there are new changes coming to the core datums)
I personally don't think overall UX is the biggest problem, if you're prepared to learn it. I've used much worse software than this, and I think a lot of people are just moaning that it isn't "immediate" or "easy". I particularly don't understand criticism of it from the OpenSCAD direction: that's often just misinformed whining from people who hate GUIs and don't believe they can offer anything over text.
Since the new Assembly workbench and the TNP mitigations were added I think it's on pretty solid footing; you can do many things more easily in Part Design now than before, based on geometry edges rather than sketch edges.
One thing I would suggest is using the tab bar workbench selector rather than the dropdown: for some reason that makes the whole thing so much more fluid.
The biggest problem is still, ultimately, robustness.
FreeCAD is capable and is indeed free, but as a beginner designing something somewhat complex it really led me into building a rat's nest of a project that I found difficult to salvage. The rough edges and general flaky behavior did not help things, and I found almost none of the user interface intuitive. If I had to do it over again I'd choose F360 or Onshape.