> I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead?
KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies.
With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically sufficient" to being a genuine option for less-demanding professionals. Since then they've been absolutely killing it, with major releases happening once a year and bringing enough quality-of-life improvements that it is actually hard to keep track of all of them.
From the type of new features it is very obvious that a lot of professional users are now showing interest in the application, and as we've seen with Blender a trickle of professional adoption can quickly turn into a flood which takes over the entire market.
KiCad still has a long way to go when it comes to complex high-speed boards (nobody in their right mind would use it to design an EPYC motherboard, for example), but it is absolutely going to steamroll the competition when it comes to the cookie-cutter 2/4/6 layer PCBs in all the everyday consumer products.
the epiphany moment was when the dev team stopped listening to the neckbeards that wanted things different for the sake of them being different, and started listening to professionals that wanted more sane workflows. There must be a reason if all industry does things simillar ways, other than inertia.
Guess what, user adoption increased dramatically, because it became pleasant (or tolerable) to use by people that used literally any other program.
V8 included in the core many things that were plugins before, and replaced the old utilities that the neckbeards in the forum were crying to keep, or else! (or else more adoption.)
V9 had even more many improvements, but also many regressions, over V8. V10 might be the release that truly consolidates the core of the suite and then they can start really focus on high speed designs.
I've navigated many programs over my career, and unless a future employer mandates me to use Altium, or purely technical reasons (8+ layer, high speed designs) requires me to use Cadence, only kicad for me.
Incidentally, it feels like this past two years freeCAD GIMP and Inkscape have started moving away from listening to noisy members of the community, to useful members of the community. I'm seeing a slow but steady progress that will eventually accelerate and make both toold true alternatives, as it happened with KiCAD (though it will really be tough for GIMP, even if it's perfectly usable for many, many tasks, any graphic designer will kick and scream if they're not given the adobe suite, pity.)
Myself, i do very little basic graphics like replicate buttons and such things to not bother my colleague, or apply correction to my photos, i proudly do that in GIMP and inkscape.
"Complaining neckbeards" are a part of the problem, but the bigger issue is often developer-users that has oversight (or preference due to "control") with shitty UI-decisions that have little interest or agency in fixing them. The non-movment complainers are more of an alibi for those developers with little UI improvement interests.
GIMP is just bad sadly even when it comes to basics, it has nothing to do with wanting Adobe products but more about GIMP just being a "coders-tool".
Every time in the last decade I checked, i still had to input a resolution when creating a new image layer.. that's a fundamental operation that hasn't been that clumsy in Photoshop since the 90s (Photoshop has "infinite" layers, they can be larger than the image, yes it's "bloated" but that's what you want as an artist 90% of the time.. not an annoying border).
> The non-movment complainers are more of an alibi for those developers with little UI improvement interests.
True, but i also remember vehement discussions on everybody else in the world that wanted the scroll / zoom to work as in every other software in the world, and a few vocal users that would spam every thread and discussion insisting that we (the rest of the world) should have been using other software instead.
You know, the usual hostile attitude open source communities are famous for. I guess that for GIMP the moment that will change everything is when they will add a proper circle tool /s
GIMP and Inkscape are already moving in the right direction with the new UIs, fingers crossed
Blender went from a shitshow way worse than GIMP to almost killing the competition. Those working on GIMP took notice (and perhaps those that had felt sidelined before dared speak up).
KiCad is awesome. Combined with git I have CI/CD pipeline in gitlab[1] that builds my fabrication files for the different fabs automatically including PiP and parts CSVs I can directly upload to LCSC. I also generate PDFs of the schematic and iBom[2] htmls files all automatically.
The thing I miss is being able to rotate a IC by 45 degrees.
KiCAD becomes better and better, but one limitation embedded into its DNA is very annoying: one project - one schematic - one PCB.
It is very kludgy and cumbersome to split project into several PCB (for example, stack of PCBs connected by backplane or headers, like Arduino & Shield for it) and/or to have variations of the PCBs for one schematics, like TH and SMD variants of the PCB for exactly same schematics.
Even in my very modest almost-electrical (as opposed to electronic) projects I need one or another from time to time.
As far as I understand it is limitation which is not easy to fix, because all architecture of KiCAD is based on this 1-1-1 principle.
My workaround for multiple PCB's for one schematic is to have the schematic as a top level sheet which can then be imported into sub-level projects. so each PCB becomes it's own project but use the common schematic sheet
For those switching from an $EXPENSIVE tool to KiCad, may I humbly recommend donating to the project, or sponsoring the development/improvement of a feature you need? Even if it's much less than your current $EXPENSIVE license, it will make a huge difference.
Yeah, KiCad has improved immensely in the past 5 years. It still has a long way to go to really compete with Altium et. al. though. The thing is: Altium is basically finished software. They keep trying to add features to it but I'm certain if you polled the users the only thing they really want is fewer crashes and bugs. Every year KiCad gets closer and closer.
KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies.
With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically sufficient" to being a genuine option for less-demanding professionals. Since then they've been absolutely killing it, with major releases happening once a year and bringing enough quality-of-life improvements that it is actually hard to keep track of all of them.
From the type of new features it is very obvious that a lot of professional users are now showing interest in the application, and as we've seen with Blender a trickle of professional adoption can quickly turn into a flood which takes over the entire market.
KiCad still has a long way to go when it comes to complex high-speed boards (nobody in their right mind would use it to design an EPYC motherboard, for example), but it is absolutely going to steamroll the competition when it comes to the cookie-cutter 2/4/6 layer PCBs in all the everyday consumer products.