gEDA (gschem and friends) has a fairly steep learning curve, but once you spend a few days getting in the zone it's a very solid schematic capture and PCB layout tool. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to try KiCad for anything serious, so I can't really make a comparison. I'm told it's now the better option vs. gEDA.
Re:Building an Open Source Laptop
by thirdsight on Friday January 10, 2014 @05:05AM
(#7035935)
They're all a pain the ass. Even commercial stuff such as Proteus and Multisim. Then there's Mentor's offering which is barf.
(I did a spot writing some workflow software for an engineering team a few years back).
Honestly, I've always felt that EAGLE was great. They have a severely limited "free" (as in beer) version, and I really prefer that to KiCad.
It doesn't help that KiCad is horrendously broken on OS X, so I have to use it in a VM.
The good news are that CERN has adopted KiCAD for it's open hardware platform and are actively developing it, adding some cool features which may make it more on par with commercial tools: http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/WorkPackages
I honestly think that might be one of the biggest impediments to open hardware; open-source circuit design software is not good right now. I try to force myself to use KiCad over EAGLE, but it's such a relative pain in the ass.