No one is forcing you to use KiCad, so use Circuitmaker? I don't see the problem.
It's funny how entitled people get when you give them free stuff.
Yes, it's been a year since this thread cooled, but I think it's time for it to reheat.
What we have here is an argument for the basic acceptability of mediocrity, in this case,
"It doesn't have to be good if you're not paying for it." An impressive position.
I'm a longtime user of really grownup EDA; which one doesn't matter, but I don't mind mentioning
if it's relevant to the discussion. The point is that it's also quite an old package, and running on a
Unix workstation with a big glass tube. So as much as I love it, I sure could use a little modernization
onto, like, something that runs on a laptop, but without windoze because anything newer than xp
has been insufferable. Anyway...
That's what led me to give KiCAD a go at the suggestion of a friend whose recommendation I felt
should be reliable. As a test project I set out to recreate a really old through-hole design, a couple
of boards that although very few people on earth have a need, the ones who need it
really need
it. Technically, unchallenging in the extreme. Little did I anticipate the nightmare that awaited.
I was doing my first pass, entering the schematic from an almost-unreadable copy of a hand-drawn
original, and found that the stock library 555 symbol was really wonky, completely out of keeping
with the way it's normally done, inputs on the left, output on the right. So I crack the symbol editor
and find they have some nice touches, like giving you the choice of adding an inverting circle, which
is something I'm used to having to manually draw in. Then I exit back to schematic capture and find
that the connections I'd made before the edit didn't stick with the pins and rubberband; instead, the
moved pins are sitting on the wrong wire ends, which haven't moved. Editing a symbol trashed the
netlist. Not cool, not even a little bit. Must have done something wrong, missed an update step or
something. Took the question to the forum and was treated like a heretic to be placed in stocks in
the public square and stoned to death.
The part I quickly found incomprehensible is that this isn't a bug, it's a feature. When you think you're
connecting a wire to a pin, you're not. All you're doing is putting an end of a line at a place where there
happens to be a dot. KiCAD's schematic capture does not join the two and add the connection to the
netlist database, because there isn't one. Somewhere later in the design flow, I guess, some netlisting
module must run around and generate meaningful data, but at that point you're just drawing a bunch
of extremely error-prone pictures, because any time you move something, lines and pins and vertices
are going to bump into each other, and without a running netlist db to verify against, KiCAD can't tell
you when you're about to screw yourself.
Over the course of a
hundred exchanges, I heard arguments that most of the friends I've talked
about it with (professional PCB designers and not) have a hard time believing had been seriously
offered:
The first, most obvious, and most condescendingly passive-aggressive: "That's just your opinion.
There's no 'right way' to do this. You'd probably be happier using something else."
"Why would anyone have to edit a symbol? Do it right the first time and you'll have no reason to
edit it later."
"Schematics exist EXCLUSIVELY as human-readable documentation. They're not supposed to build
a database or anything else."
From the friend who recommended it, but did not participate in this bun fight: "The project was
started by a guy at CERN!", implying that being associated with a multibillion-dollar Big Science
project confers the Trademark of Quality on some guy in someone's department's software project,
and ignoring the fact that giant organizations like that have budgets discretionary enough to let
just about anyone take a stab at some new crap if the argument is halfway good (e.g. It's for an
open-source package that'll sweep the world!), and that they also have more than their fair share
of boobs on staff.
The litany of idiotic arguments really is pretty stunning, go read it yourself if you must. The
short answer is that my personal, professional determination is that unless and until KiCAD
reconsiders their
shockingly naive and trivial approach to schematic capture, it's Greasy
Kid Stuff and not ready for prime time. Maybe their layout is
brilliant, but I'll have no
chance to find out as long as schematic is crap.
The other point this underscores is that open-source software users exhibit cult victim behaviour.
Not universally, there's a lot of both good and bad, but there's always tribalism. And there's
certainly the idea that because open-source is
morally superior to commercial software
(because it's being done for righteous reasons, and not just filthy profit), that moral superiority
somehow confers
technical superiority - and that's where they go off the rails, sacrificing
any reasonable degree of objective judgement.
And... oh, yeah... the GUI's really awful too. These people (the developers) have obviously never
heard the old saying about how great composers don't invent - they steal. Go and nick the best
ideas available for your GUI from every piece of software you can get access to and roll them
together into a
better one. NIH is for idiots.