I’ve decided to try to learn electronics, and for this, I will of course need to interact with hardware (cables, resistors, diodes, etc…), but I’m lucky I was born in a time when a great deal of circuit design can be done from a computer using specialized software.
Being very new to this world and a stubborn Linux user, I did a quick search to try to find what’s my best option. I stumbled into this Electronics Circuit Simulator Software comparison page in Wikipedia.
I mainly looked at 3 things:
- Compatible with Linux
- Latest release date
- Open source
With these simple requirements, I found two contenders:
Qucs-S has a nice graphical user interface, but depends on a SPICE back-end (e.g. Ngspice) to run. Due to this dependency, I’m going to be required to learn Ngspice anyway, so I decided to start with this one.