I’ve been using freecad with great success for years now and I’d say while I agree freecad is rough in terms of ux, it is highly usable, especially after 1.0 version. I feel like investing time in overcoming its flaws and weaknesses will pay off in the future, as it will enable access to a stable, eternally free and reliable software. Though I also agree it crashes frequently, I set a very frequent auto save and I don’t often get screwed now.
The reason I’m not going for pei or any other spring steel sheet is it isn’t flat and warps with temperature. I’d need to compensate for warping and potentially flatten my bed, which all goes away with glass. Additionally, since I’m on ender 5, the weight doesn’t matter, so that is what I use. Also, for me petg is better than pla in almost every way i use the printer, I care about creeping and temperature stability, which makes petg the absolute king. But for some other use cases, other stuff makes more sense.
Just get a few new pieces of glass/mirror cut to the same size. I’ve been using a piece of mirror for years now. No glue, nothing. Petg all of the time. Works great. Has a few blemishes, but still perfectly flat and very cheap.
Well, it definitely isn’t suppose to be THAT bad. I can get a crash every half an hour or even longer. Usually for no apparent reason - like when I want to sketch on a face and the app switches from PartDesign workbench to sketcher or wise versa. And then after restart that doesn’t happen again. That is annoying, has been happening for ages and would really like it to be fixed. But it’s not every few minutes, more like half an hour to an hour.