gEDA-user: gEDA and pcb status and minigration from Eagle

[Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear gEDA community,

this is my first mail to the list, thus do not flame me if I ask silly 
questions.
For the last days I was looking for a open source program for PCB design.
I came across KiCad and the gEDA package not mentioned some of the smaller 
proggis around the web.

Here and there I played around with both already, but never make some serious 
work. Back at my windows OS times I teached myself Eagle and whenever I had to 
do some "real" work, I switched to the free eagle version for Linux.
Nevertheless, over the last months I changed my work habits from a MS windows 
like style with fancy pretty 3d windows (e.g., KDE) to a minimalistic design 
and the command-line (e.g., awesome wm). Thus, I killed more and more 
proprietary programs and replaced bloated GUI-programs by "KISS"(keep it 
simple stupid)-versions. Now, it is time to look again into EDA.

Initially, I believe that according to my work habits, gEDA and pcb might be 
more suitable to me then KiCad. However, I can not see the ongoing usage and 
development of this projects in the near future. I saw actual releases for 
both packages but do not know whether there is really an active development in 
progress. Package management systems of different distributions ship rather old 
versions and the blogosphere and Internet is rather quite about this packages.

Furthermore, can I do all the stuff I was used to do in eagle with gEDA and pcb 
?
Are there any shortcuts or limitations ?
How mature and stable are the suite yet ? 
Can it be really considered for serious work ?

As for me I have no problem to get my hand dirty and crawl around in config-
files and text-files. I even will love to see that maybe one or another task can 
be done by simply writing some text-files in emacs (or vi to avoid a war).
For Eagle, I liked the little command line at the bottom of the window, which 
allowed me to type in comments rather then clicking and searching around in 
GUI-settings. If there is something like this in gschem or pcb I would be 
happy to use it.

I know to ask all this questions here is a bit silly, since you all are 
somehow biased (otherwise you would not read this list ;) ). 
So, please try to give me a very objective idea about the status of the 
project. :)

Just don't want to ride a dead horse and notice later that the projects freeze 
and I spend all the fun to learn it without further be able to use it.

I highly appreciate any comments and suggestions.

Thanks,

Torsten


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