Compiling FreeCAD on MacOS, wow, that wasn't so easy

WobblyHand

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Recently jumped the shark to MacOS by buying a new MacBookPro. My old Linux laptop hardware was giving me a lot of hardware grief and none of the simple remedies were working. Having complete HW shutdowns as a result of USB activities, was one of them, and having an INOP keyboard, whose replacement was also INOP was making this laptop become a pain in the neck. I just couldn't make myself buy another laptop from my previous suppler, since I had run into too many major (4) HW problems. Time to move on. Since I've never had a Mac before, thought I'd try one.

Anyways, I naively reasoned that under all the nice veneer, macos is unix like, so I'd be ok with building my goto app, FreeCAD. Well, not so fast, young fella, things are different enough that your Linux experience isn't quite going to carry you through. You see, building FreeCAD requires a bunch of version control for some of the pre-requisites. That's kind of normal. An OS program like this requires a lot of volunteer work to keep stuff up to date, and it takes a while. I can appreciate that. Homebrew is commonly used on Macs, and it has this ugly habit of upgrading all your stuff, and consequently breaking your subsequent builds. There's ways around this, but they aren't pretty. It's not like apt, a true package manager, as brew will remove your old versions when it installs the new one. That's not always what one wants.

Eventually I found a way to do this with the instructions given at: https://github.com/oursland/FreeCAD-Build-Notes but there were some steps left for the user to figure out. Well, being new to a Mac, and new to Visual Studio (a MicroSoft product!) it took a little bit to get there. Basically, I came to a pretty quick stop, mostly since I didn't have any idea what I was doing, or needed to do next! I have never been a SW developer, but have occassionally been asked to review other folks SW, so I had some idea that the build environment/project hadn't been set up right.

I opened an issue on the above link, and have gotten enough answers to get FreeCAD to compile on Apple Silicon. And finally, this morning it worked. I can open my old files now and even do some FEM simulations. Picture is an adapter that I designed, that tends to stress the daylights out of a lot of CAD programs, with lots of threads. For some reason, FreeCAD really labors with hidden line removal for some technical drawing views.
Screenshot 2023-12-11 at 12.27.15 PM.jpg
Eventually, I want to be able to get the ability to simulate acoustics, which requires the integration of elmer FEM into FreeCAD. Beats me how to do that, but hoping to crack that nut someday. Seems like I would need my own sandbox to compile elmer, similar to how it was done for FreeCAD. But let's take one step at a time, and at least be thankful for getting this far!
 
Is the pre built mac version a bit behind or do you need to compile in an esoteric feature ?

Stu
 
Is the pre built mac version a bit behind or do you need to compile in an esoteric feature ?

Stu
Stu, the pre-built versions are not far behind at all. Just that I got used to running the latest version.

If you are running the latest, and there's a problem, you can ask on the the FreeCAD forum, and get a fast fix. Recompile and the problem vanishes. I've been building FreeCAD (on Linux, now Mac) for about a year now.

When I get brave enough (actually knowledgeable enough,) then I will want to explore making some changes. They aren't much, but I'd like to look at some things that just plain bug me. Some of the FEM displays need work, as well as looking into the reason that FreeCAD seems to put sketch dimensions in the worst possible places. I don't know how they do that, but it always seemed they went out of their way to plunk a dimension in a place for maximum poor readability! I suspect a fix would be hard, but I'd like to examine how it's done and play around with it.

Going through this process has taught me some important things, which I hope to be able to transfer to my desire to build elmer FEM capabilities.

Bruce
 
I'm still a Mac lurker- the price of the hardware and difficulty of repair puts me off, so it's ThinkPad and Linux for me
 
I was forever a Mac lurker, never being able to justify it. It's a closed system, to be sure. They are also relatively well built. I remember taking apart my daughter's MacBook a couple of years ago to remove the HDD and being amazed at the build quality. Yeah, that was a while back, but still. Nowadays, you have to basically buy what you expect will be suitable for the life of the product.

Just recently priced somewhat comparable computers with comparable memory and was a bit astounded that for a 1TB/32GB system, the Mac wasn't a whole lot more. So I switched this year. I can say a MacBookPro has astoundingly better life on a single charge. Like nearly 8-10x better. Got a Mac for my wife too. It's been a transition, there's still a bunch of "dumb stuff" that I'm constantly looking up, that's different. As I get older, it's less fun to do IT support. That was part of the reason for the change. Having your computer repeatably shut off completely, because you were programming an Arduino (for my ELS) sort of soured me. No one wanted to take responsibility for tracking down either a hardware or software fault that caused this. And no, there were no traces of the fault in the journal files. I just wanted out from that hardware...

Been in the Linux camp since the 90's, so this has been quite the experience. The Mac OOB experience has overall been quite pleasant, I can see why some folks are fan boys. I think the product is well made and has good aesthetics.
 
For many the closed system is ideal- Microsoft opium never appealed to me
I like the open source concept- Torvalds is a genius
All those Unix guys were smart
 
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For many the closed system is ideal- Microsoft didn't quite get it
I like the open source concept
So do I. I've installed quite a bit of Open Source on my Mac now. Makes the transition easier.

Still amazed by how arcane some of the Mac stuff is. Lots of funny multiple key things to do things. I need to make a crib sheet for them. Still don't understand why Home and End are mapped the way they are. They don't work in terminal sessions but do in a browser. Weird. It's hard to get to the end of the command line. Well, it's hard simply because I don't know how yet.

Basically, they created a different world and some of the rules are remapped, so learning it all is slower than I'd like.
 
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