eh. every version of kicad has bugs that some would consider showstoppers, I don’t see why it’s any worse to use nightly (I’m assuming developers will try hard to avoid FORWARD compatibility issues).
Because it crashes often and every now and then there’s a bug in basic functionality which prevents you doing your work. You of course decide how much it costs to you. If you can bear it, I heartily encourage using the development nightlies and then reporting the issues. That way KiCad will become better.
The situation is of course different when no new features are added and it’s closer to the next release candidate. I used both pre-5.0 and pre-5.1 for work.
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But no version of kicad has ever not had these issues. Give me a number and I’m sure I could dig up half a dozen issues on the tracker, to say nothing of unknown bug.
Of course. But it’s a matter of how often these happen in day to day work and how much they prevent you doing what you need to do.
This is true of stable release to next stable release (for example, 5.1 to 6.0) but isn’t necessarily as true from one nightly to the next. One example: In the nightlies, there’s currently a prototype of rules-based DRC. We know that the thing we eventually include in 6.0 will look different, and we are not planning to try hard to make it so that people who are playing with the prototype will have a seamless experience migrating to the final version. Of course in general we try for forwards compatibility but there are exceptions, so it’s always wise to treat the nightly builds as “just for testing purposes” before there is a feature freeze.
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Right now 5.99 is getting new features that might be reversed out again and are not final in structure.
Once 5.99 goes into a feature freeze, using it for a project that you want to keep will be much safer.
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Lets ignore the fact that 5.1.6 is at least the 4th iteration of the same basic feature set and as a result of that incredibly bug free. Yes there are still bug but most of them are minor annoyances not really something that will damage your project.
And showstoppers might be a bit of a strange wording here to be honest. This word is normally used for missing features not for bugs.
Here my reasons why i think nightly is not the right thing for most users:
No documentation.
Extremely limited support even here on the forum (caused by missing documentation and reduced user base).
Way more bugs than in the stable version especially critical ones (full on crashes and file corruptions).
Fast changing system which means you might need to relearn at least parts of KiCad multiple times (this also impacts support options as it is a lot harder to know what the exact feature set of your version is and how it compares to mine).
Speciality right now: Schematic file format in flux -> i would not even bet on forward compatibility right now to be honest. I would even assume there are critical bugs in it that can wreck your project.
Connected to that: missing support infrastructure for the new file format. This means there are fewer scripts and more importantly fewer people who know the format. The latter means if something goes wrong you are basically limited to the devs and a few power users for help.
Really if your livelihood depends on KiCad then i suggest you stay with stable (note this is a suggestion, feel free to ignore it).
If not (example you do it for fun or education) then by all means play with nightly and help make KiCad better by creating bug reports for every problem you find.
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In the era of KiCad V3 or V4 is used nightly builds for some time. Mostly because any KiCad version was buggy and some quite important features were not implemented in the stable version.
Then one of my boards got “stuck” for a few months, because of newly introduced bugs in the nightlies and people smarter then me were working on those serious bugs, but it took quite a while to fix. I also could not open the PCB in the stable version of KiCad anymore because of file format changes.
If you want to help with finding bugs, giving user feedback for new features etc, then nightlies are good for you. For example:
If you prefer stability, or simply can’t risk a project getting stuck for a week or a month, then use the stable version.
Much further down the road and after 5.99 goes into file structure and feature freeze, it will be safer to use for real work and the new functions will make it attractive over 5.1.x.
At that point it will need heavy testing to cull bugs before first release
Keep in mind that some third party solutions (action plugins, external scripts, …) will not work with nightlies.
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