free CADCAM

For anyone wanting to explore FreeCAD I would highly recommend using the latest development versions. There are nightly builds available through a ppa but I personally would (and do) opt for the near weekly builds of the AppImages from here - github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-Bundle/releases/tag/weekly-builds - Linux, Mac and Window$. No worries about dependences and if any given build has a showstopper bug, you can still have the last weeks to keep going until the next build that will, 99% of the time have that bug fixed. Lots of advanced and more complete features keep showing up. Especially in the CAM workbench.

This is worth reiterating, IMO. Folks seem to be offput by the risk of bugs/crashes in the "weekly" builds, which is both fair and overblown. It's fair in that individual weekly builds occasionally have large issues/bugs (hence Spyderbreath's sound suggestion to not delete your known-working version until you've verified the very latest works). It's overblown in that most of the time they're actually less prone to crashing than 1.0 and have a lot of improvements.

This isn't Microsoft- you can find a weekly build that works for you, and then just not update it if you want a middle ground of getting some of the newer improvements while avoiding most of the instability.