If you're new to making circuit boards, I highly recommend giving KiCad a try, for drawing your schematic and board layout. It's open source, and while there are some rough edges, it seems to be built on a good foundation and there's been lots of good work being done on it lately. The learning curve isn't too steep, as these things go, but you're not likely to be limited it anytime soon, if ever.
Don't forget Fritzing! While Fritzing is most commonly used for making very professional-looking diagrams of breadboard layouts, it's also a complete and extremely capable EDA suite. I've done several boards in Fritzing, and taken a few of those to production (> 1000 qty).
Also, unlike Eagle and Orcad and circuit studio, Fritzing is free as in beer and speech. Same with KiCAD, but the learning curve on Fritzing is just so much easier.
While I think your assessment is correct, I do want to note that it's not like starting with Eagle, Altium, Orcad, etc is going to be easier. Just jumping into a complex, domain specific piece of software is tough, but totally worth it here.
Right - the problems attacked by these programs are inherently hard, I think. Some projects care a lot about things that are completely irrelevant in others (BOM management, creepages, RF concerns), etc. Any given component might have a single schematic symbol, multiple footprints, and several parameters which may or may not change with either of those (flash size/temperature rating/etc). Then, what's the right way to attach any library changes to the project where they are applied, how do you handle changes...
I use KiCAD when I am forced to. Of the two open source EDA packages that I am aware of, KiCAD certainly has an easier learning curve than gEDA. That said, I started with gEDA so I have surmounted the learning and libraries problems sufficiently for my needs. My beef with KiCAD is that it is weak sauce, I find it missing a number of the features that I take for granted with gEDA. I don’t use KiCAD for personal projects, the limitations frustrate me. OTOH Somebody just starting out and doing simple boards would probably find KiCAD more approachable than gEDA.
I too dragged myself up the seemingly insurmountable learning curve that was gEDA about a decade ago and used it exclusively for many years. I poked around in KiCad every now and then and didn't think much of it either.
Since the changes that CERN made, KiCad is a completely new tool. It is now my tool of choice, and unless gEDA gets a similarly drastic revamp, I'm probably never going back.
Out of interest, what KiCad limitations frustrate you? My main frustration is with pcbnew's (the layout program) apparent inability to store sets of design rules, so they need to be set for each run.
I've not got any skin in the game as such, but occasionally think about contributing to it - usually after getting irritated by random UI things, but so far it's never quite been enough to dive in and fix anything.
KiCAD is not bad but I definitely file under the category of software for people who like screwing around with software. If you’re making boards in your kitchen then the free edition of Eagle will be more than satisfactory, and it comes with decades worth of user-contributed libraries and scripts.
Depends on your taste. Personally, I hate Eagle and find it really painful to use. KiCAD has rough spots, but I like its workflow a lot more. Plus Eagle's free version restrictions are pretty tight, 80 cm^2 and 2 schematic sheets are quite restrictive even for a hobbyist. I don't begrudge people who use it, but I genuinely prefer KiCAD. And if you're going to pay for a license for your EDA software, I think there are better options as well (OrCAD).
Regarding libraries, in the hobby community Eagle has lost a lot of momentum in the past couple of years. KiCAD is now what you see a lot of makers releasing libraries and stuff for.
Yeah I’ve noticed a preference among the library authors for kicad-compatible releases. That’s fine with me. I consider it analogous to the situation between clang and GCC. All the compiler people are working on clang these days. But GCC is still the better compiler, through the sheer mass of accumulated contributions. Someday the new thing will surpass the old thing.
http://kicad-pcb.org/