Wow I haven’t read a good chunk of this list, and I thought I was a sci-fi book afficionado. Thanks for adding to my summer reading list! Might start with either Parable of the Sower or Never Let Me Go.

I would also recommend checking out salome. It has a parametric CAD module like you would be used to in SolidWorks. It felt a little less finicky to me than freecad , and I also think it has more controllable STL generation compared to freecad.

I think sometime went wrong with your KDE frameworks description. Looks like the some python notes got in there instead.

Love seeing all the updates! OpenSUSE has been working great for me.

The missing middle. The last city I lived in had a bunch of houses in the 1200sqft 2br/1ba range but they were built before 1950 and are now in the “historic” part of town that is zoned to prevent redevelopment. It’s also the closest to the city center where many jobs are located and events like festivals take place. So it’s a very desirable place to live and houses here sell for $1M+.

The next ring out from the historic district was built between the 50s and early 2000s and is largely 2000+sqft homes on larger plots of land. Large plots of land are desirable so those go for $800k+.

After the 2008 financial crisis we started building our third ring of housing with humongous “luxury” houses with 6+br. They’re on tiny plots of land with maybe 6ft separating the houses, but since they have large sqft, granite countertops, and faux marble tiles in the bathroom they go for $700k+.

Oh yeah and housing has been underbuilt since the 1970s so the vacancy rate is under 1%, and it’s a smaller city (~200,000 people) so the job opportunities aren’t plentiful and the best paying. I have no idea how so many of these houses are being paid for. I bet a lot of people that have bought since 2010 are house poor. Or a lot of them are cruising on super low interest rates.

I’ve been using SALOME to create parametric 3D geometry. My use case is to parameterize my geometry features and export to STL files that I use with OpenFOAM. SALOME is integrated with a couple of grid generators, and I really like it’s 2D/triangulation/STL integration with netgen. You can specify faces for refinement to a desired mesh size, so for example around complex features you can create a fine STL mesh and on simple shapes you can have a really coarse mesh.

I’ve found the 3D modeling to be pretty straightforward, and SALOME usually does a pretty good job if you have to go back and modify previous features (something I’ve struggled with in FreeCAD).

I’ve also used FreeCAD for mesh generation, and it works ok but I’ve found the triangulation leaves a lot to be desired for splitting up the mesh as needed for OpenFOAM boundaries.

If you’re making STL files for 3D printing and you want a parametric CAD modeler for engineering parts, give it a try. If you want complex faces with artistic style, I would suggest Blender.