<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>robomartin</author><text>I wonder if you have used 6.x?&lt;p&gt;As soon as 6.0 was released we switched all future work to KiCad from Altium Designer.  This after held licenses for AD going back to P-CAD days (2006, if I remember correctly) and previously using OrCAD and other professional tools.  In short, I got sick and tired of sending thousands of dollars per year to Altium for them to burn the cash adding cloud-based functionality nobody I know wants at all.  As a result, AD is just piled-on with bugs, issues, inconsistencies and you can pretty much expect every single update to deliver new bugs.&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, we&amp;#x27;ve done several boards with KiCAD.  We are not sorry at all that we made the change.  Sure, it could be improved.  The good news is, it will.  Also, we are happy to financially contribute towards KiCad development because we know it will not go towards bullshit designed to try to sell the company to a larger company (Altium tried to attract Autodesk, and failed --ADSK probably saw the mess AD had become and backed away).&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, I think KiCad is good for probably 95%, if not 99%, of any board anyone might want to design.  I go back to the early 80&amp;#x27;s for PCB design, which means that I have done some pretty advanced boards with tools that were far more primitive than KiCad.&lt;p&gt;As a side note, being able to use Python to drive aspects of KiCad is awesome.  We&amp;#x27;ve already created a number of useful utilities relevant to our work.</text><parent_chain><item><author>eternityforest</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve pretty much given up on KiCad. LibrePCB has a much easier UI, KiCad is essentially the Vim of PCBs.&lt;p&gt;Libre is already good enough in all ways except the fact you have to make a lot of parts yourself(Which is pretty fast, but still), for anything simple.&lt;p&gt;Anything it can&amp;#x27;t do, is probably a high budget kind of thing and you can afford the really good tools(But Libre might get there too, if it keeps going for another 5 years)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Melting KiCad</title><url>https://mitxela.com/projects/melting_kicad</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>01100011</author><text>I recently did my first KiCad project and found it to be quite cool.  Most of my previous experience was 10+ years ago with Orcad and whatever free EDA tools were around then, so I&amp;#x27;m not up to date regarding KiCad&amp;#x27;s competition but I didn&amp;#x27;t find much to complain about.  The issues I had were quickly resolved with a rich assortment of how-to videos and tutorials.&lt;p&gt;I had to make a part using KiCad as well, and even that process was straightforward.  I&amp;#x27;m excited to work on my next layout project now after having used it.  Bonus points for the 3D rendering mode which worked spectacularly on Ubuntu out of the box.  It was very handy to visualize the finished board before assembly.</text><parent_chain><item><author>eternityforest</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve pretty much given up on KiCad. LibrePCB has a much easier UI, KiCad is essentially the Vim of PCBs.&lt;p&gt;Libre is already good enough in all ways except the fact you have to make a lot of parts yourself(Which is pretty fast, but still), for anything simple.&lt;p&gt;Anything it can&amp;#x27;t do, is probably a high budget kind of thing and you can afford the really good tools(But Libre might get there too, if it keeps going for another 5 years)</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Melting KiCad</title><url>https://mitxela.com/projects/melting_kicad</url></story>