I disagree, but please don't downvote stuff like this--respond with a thought out comment, thanks. I upvoted you.
Perhaps Xilinx-land is different, but I have seen an intern go from blank Windows machine to "blink an LED" on an Altera board in about an hour or so with no Verlog/VHDL.
I have never seen this with the open-source toolchains.
For the record, just months ago I installed the open tools and did get to the led blinking in less than 10 minutes, with no prior Verilog experience.
I could count the time to "install open tools", too, but it would be even less favorable to the proprietary toolchain. It was, after all, a single command (on Arch Linux) that finished in a few seconds at worst.
There's a lot of tutorials these days based on iCE40 and open toolchain.
Then I went on to read yosys's documentation, and learned a great deal about how the flow from verilog to hardware works in a very short amount of time, by just doing so.
It really depends on your prior experience. If you're a programmer that's used to working with a command line-based Unix environment, the open tools will feel a lot more familiar than the proprietary ones.
When someone says "beginner", I never think of someone who already knows the Unix command line.
I've been doing this for far too many years, and I'm struggling to think of anybody I know who does FPGA work and knows the UNIX command line--even among the experienced hands.
I think us "old hats" using GNU/Linux from the 90s are increasingly getting interested in the hardware side of things.
You are likely too biased in the Windows world, which is exactly what HN is not (probably! I have no data to prove that, just a hunch based on the discussions I took a part of on HN).
I think many people default to downvote-when-disagree. It's partially the "like/dislike" culture, but I think it's mostly because it's the opposite of upvote-when-agreeing.
I agree with you that downvotes are useless when one simply disagrees and don't help the author or the reader learn. With the "flag" feature though, I am not sure I see the point of downvoting at all (other than when someone repeats the same disproven argument in the thread): upvoting is there to indicate "me too", but any such thing turns into a popularity context.
I think it took me about that long using the open tools. There is a 2 hour self-hosted beginner workshop for the icebreaker that gets you a little further than blinking.
Professional tools are judged by such metrics. Manufacturers put tremendous effort into onboarding neophytes because they know whichever stack of tools get the job done with the lowest cost labor will grab a lot of market. The old heads that can write Verilog from memory are trapped in zoom meetings dealing with 'managers.'
Sadly this frequently manifests as huge, Eclipse based bloatware with byzantine installation processes and comical fragility. Precious few understand the value of lightweight, robust tools and confuse elaborate graphical wizards and code generators with quality.
Typically you just use the tool the vendor provides. Vivado if you're using Xilinx. Quartus if you're using Altera. I agree that the tools are bloated monstrosities whichever one you're using.
Perhaps Xilinx-land is different, but I have seen an intern go from blank Windows machine to "blink an LED" on an Altera board in about an hour or so with no Verlog/VHDL.
I have never seen this with the open-source toolchains.
Your experience differs. YMMV. Disclaimers. etc.