Re: gEDA-user: PCB & Gschem

[Karel Kulhavy <clock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 09:37:18PM +0000, Marc Price wrote:
> Oh Well if a newbie cant work out what footprint you might as well scrap 
> Geda right now
> It will be consigned to the grave yard of electronics programs.

AFAIK gEDA is used for only small amount of projects. Amateurs usually
use Eagle. Professionals Eagle, Protel, Orcad.

gEDA developers value usability low and freedom high. Most users value
it the other way which leads to the low penetration. When someone wanted
to contribute to Ronja, the current usability of gEDA was a huge problem
for him. Even when I am designing, most of the time is spent on things
that gEDA could already solve (I need to draw another DE9 symbol because
the one supplied lacks shielding, I need to make my own footprints for
coils, fprward annotation is slow and prone to user errors etc.) and not
so much time on actual design.

Someone tried Kicad which is also free software and said there are no
usability problems like with gEDA and that everything went smoothly, he
could do a small devel cycle in 5 minutes. With gEDA a newbie devel
cycle with a resistor, capacitor, connector and transistor is about 1
week. Lot of time is spent on figuring out which version of gEDA and
PCB, fiddling with libraries and customizing your OS installation to
gEDA, lot of time is also spent on reading documentation and figuring
out obscure questions like the cursed footprint= attribute. But someone
else said Kicad doesn't have undo, which is the most essential feature.
You can try out.

I would rather prefer gEDA gaining usability than some Kicad because
gEDA people seem to have the right design attitude and I also don't want
to migrate to a different system :)

CL<
> 
> Marc :-(