CAD package suggestions?

The best I have found is drawio, it's on-line at draw.io which takes you to

Yes, drawio is pretty good these days, much better than of old. But it is more a drawing program than a CAD one. For CAD, the other one I'd suggest for Linux is LibreCad.

NanoCAD works well and is AutoCAD compatible.

For general drawing I use Inkscape. Depends whether you need 'CAD' or just drawing.

For drawing house plans I used SolveSpace - basically draw shapes for the rooms, add dimensions and constraints (when walls are parallel or contiguous) and it works out how they all fit together. The 'downside' is that it doesn't let you draw something that doesn't actually work physically (and could need a bit of fudging based on the accuracy of your measurements).

Theo

Agreed. I also use InkScape, for drawings rather than CAD. It is 'better' than drawio - but the latter has lots of useful 'snap-to' features. It is close to a free, cross-platform, Visio.

Both drawio and Inscape use SVG as their native file format, which is nice. I haven't looked, but I doubt either output in a CAD-oriented format.

Haven't come across that, thanks for the pointer.

Inkscape can export in DXF which can be consumed by CAD packages such as AutoCAD. It can read some kinds of DXF but some versions (there are many) are awkward. DXF doesn't capture all the 'drawing' type things so it might miss out on some graphical effects when exporting.

You could use it to convert SVG from Drawio to DXF if that's what you wanted.

It's really intended for 3D CAD (lets you draw your part based on sketches with constraints) so it's not quite as 'pretty' (eg you can't colour in your sketch with crosshatching or shading, or draw random stuff on top of it, although you can add text) - if you're drawing for a planning application you probably want it to look a particular way. But it's neat in the way of 'just inaccurately draw some stuff and let it figure out a scale drawing from random dimensions you added'. Then you could export it to another package to make it 'pretty' if that's what you want.

If you do actually want CAD to look like CAD (eg send for planning permission) then LibreCAD sounds like a good bet - I've never got into it, but I should probably spend more effort on it.

Theo

I've been very happy with qCad

TurboCad V4 was the last purely 2D TurboCad for Windows, quite well developed and very useable but like any CAD program it might take a while to become fluent with it. It was released as a Free TurboCad Learning Edition when the program moved on to Vs 5 & 6 and is available for download here

TW

Thanks everyone, that's 5 suggestions to play with.

I may be some time...

Andy

Good luck. It looks like there is a pdf user manual for Turbocad v6

No-one mentioned it... Blender

Will do CAD, 3D design animation, world building. And it all starts with a cube.

I use and recommend it.