You definitely need to use a mouse with a middle button/scroll wheel, IME. With this, there are presets which work just like other CAD programs e.g. Solidworks. Without it, it’s very difficult to use, but that’s not unique to FreeCAD.
The base UI is quite bad but there are ways to improve it - either through settings and better organisation [0] or via plugins.
I’d suggest to watch a couple of tutorials specifically on 1.1 ([1] was my entry point) as every CAD program had quirks and frustrations at first. I’d say that for hobby-level creations, 1.1 now has ~80% of the usability of Solidworks, once you figure out how.
I’m not sure what’s going on with the performance on your system; I’ve used various 1.1 versions on a Windows laptop and a MacBook Pro and they’re both sufficiently performant. (I usually use a development or RC build from GitHub [2])
Thanks for the links, especially [0]. That one was the most compelling for showing how an experienced user actually models a part. It's a shame that the UI defaults need to be tweaked so much to make things usable but I know there's no single UI that works for everyone.
The base UI is quite bad but there are ways to improve it - either through settings and better organisation [0] or via plugins.
I’d suggest to watch a couple of tutorials specifically on 1.1 ([1] was my entry point) as every CAD program had quirks and frustrations at first. I’d say that for hobby-level creations, 1.1 now has ~80% of the usability of Solidworks, once you figure out how.
I’m not sure what’s going on with the performance on your system; I’ve used various 1.1 versions on a Windows laptop and a MacBook Pro and they’re both sufficiently performant. (I usually use a development or RC build from GitHub [2])
[0] https://youtu.be/LKq7hgbu7ks
[1] https://youtu.be/VEfNRST_3x8
[2] https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases