It is much more advanced in its user interface than gEDA and enjoys a fair amount of popularity.
KiCAD is another schematic/PCB layout package that is also completely free and open source. For now though, I would not recommend it. Some folks are happy with it, and being open source does commend it somewhat. While it is not fundamentally flawed as Eagle CAD is, it is just too hard to use for me. It has been around a fairly long time and is still lacking in a lot of user interface areas. Unfortunately, it is pretty much a labor of love for its developers with little outside support.
The gEDA software suite has the big advantage of being entirely free and open source. For that reason I don’t give these programs a second look. If you want to have your PCB made elsewhere, you are out of luck. While some of these products may be quite capable, they suffer from one huge drawback – you are locked into their services. Some commercial PCB fabricators offer their own free online software. I believe the ones listed run under all three mainstream operating systems, but I am only certain about Linux versions. Since I use Linux on my PC, I have only looked at the packages than run under Linux. NOTE: There may be some other applications than the ones I have mentioned. This guide will look at the options available and make recommendations based on the author’s knowledge and preferences. While there are a plethora of commercial products, most of them expensive – very expensive, there are relatively few that are low cost or free for the open source designer. When you finish the design and prototyping of your project and you want to make a PCB, you need to use some kind of PCB layout software.
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