If anyone is looking for a parametric CAD optimization rabbit hole to go down, please geek on on SolveSpace! I'm sure others would appreciate it.
I love using it for quick engineering project mockups.
BRL CAD VS FREECAD SOFTWARE
It's really too bad, because putting something like that together is otherwise super fast and easy in SolveSpace. FreeCAD is a free and open-source (under the LGPLv2+ license) general-purpose parametric 3D CAD modeler and a building information modeling (BIM) software with. It quickly degenerated into half-hour redraws and I gave up finishing the assembly. I modeled the channel details of Coroplast w/a large step+repeat between two layers, then linked that sheet into an assembly twice in the two transverse orientations, those were then each step+repeated with a 1-sheet gap to accommodate one another to form the entire stack. The most recent thing was modeling a heat exchanger made of transversely stacked Coroplast sheets. Here's some context on the kind of SolveSpace limitations I've encountered. Think, invent, and create from your ideas with BRL-CAD an open-source platform that you can use for any design purpose for 100 free. I hope SolveSpace can get more attention to improve the performance problems, because I often find myself making models too complicated for it to handle before it gets bogged down then I end up halting progress on the project adding another "profile solvespace and optimize whatever is preventing further progress here" entry to my endless TODO list.
BRL CAD VS FREECAD CODE
For example, LibreCAD operates under the umbrella of BRL-CAD in Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In. Actually, they collaborate closely with LibreCAD, the previous AutoCAD alternative on this list. Otherwise, its UI is minimal and stays out of the way for the most part, the way it encourages components residing in separate files then be linked into assemblies is very intuitive for a programmer like me, and it's proven to be quite stable. BRL-CAD is yet another free and open-source alternative to AutoCAD. It's pretty great except it becomes unusably slow once models get complicated with lots of instancing through step+repeat operations. My goto for doing CAD stuff on Linux is currently SolveSpace.
I tried FreeCAD over a year ago and it was so crashy it was useless.