Hi,

I am looking a good and inexpensive CAD software (for Linux of course).
I did a little search on Google and QCAD seems to be rather popular for a very democratic price.

Does anyone here have some experience with CAD software running on Linux?
Is QCAD worth buying?

PS : I know there is a demo of QCAD, but having to restart the program every 10mins is kind of annoying.

I don't have any experience of using CAD software, but there's this one: CADEMIA or DraftSight.

Lots more on these lists: CAD Software & CAD Links.

I wish I could answer you question better but I will at least try. A lot depends on what kind of cad user you are and what you are looking to do with cad. I have installed cad on linux before but I was just playing around I did not do any real work with it. It has been a while since I did that. I would say do some research if you have not already on what is available. As for buying I think you should make sure that what you are buying meets your needs first and that you want it that bad. As for cad options there are plenty out there. I do from time to time run across pages with links to cad programs and some for linux. The cad I have done was with auto-cad which was at my place of employment at the time. Later I learned I could do a lot with a little program called blender which also has some limited cad tools. The way I learned cad was I bought a book and was loaned auto-cad which I spent two months of dreary hard tiring reading and learning the commands. Later I was giving completed projects which I re-created. My real enjoyment with cad was not until I was out doing it without having to look at the book or ask for help. It was only then that cad become fun for me. Its hard work. So if your really interested in using cad my advice is look at your needs first then find the software you need from there. If your new to cad then I would not be above using a demo or what ever I could find. Later as your needs grow so would the software that you need and your knowledge of that software.

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Thanks for the answers.

I used some smaller cad program on Windows before (Graphicworks) for drawing electrical house wiring, so nothing very special.

Now I am building a simple 3-axis CNC machine and the CAD program would be mainly used to draw the machine in a first place and after that to design the pieces for the machine.

From what I could find SagCAD seemed to have CAM support (that's what I would need for the CNC software) but this one give lots of errors/warnings in Japanese that I cannot understand and the program seems to regularly crash (program just closes and no error at all).

I found that QCAD has a community version which is 100% free so I am currently testing this one, only draw back is that the CAM plugin is not free (about $150) but there are other ways to get my CAM files so the plugin will be for later when I decide to stick with QCAD.

Any suggestions for another CAD software are welcome, but it has to be Linux