My students and I have been rooting for the gEDA project for a long time. This toolsuite is supposed to automate the design and layout of printed circuit boards, providing an alternative to wacky and expensive proprietary EDA tools…
Unfortunately, gEDA is not ready for prime time. The user interface of each tool in the suite is radically different, but they're all pretty hopeless. More importantly, key functionality is either missing, or impossible to use and understand.
This is too bad. I have both the need and the ability to learn to design and simulate circuits and then have them fabbed. Sadly, my current alternatives seem to be either gEDA or CadSoft's Eagle. Eagle is free, but only for boards up to a small size. It also has a scary user interface. (For some reason, my students all run it on Windows instead of Linux. I should find out what that reason is.)
Until there's something decent out there, I think I'll just wait. Someone else can design circuits for me. But I wish gEDA was ready.
Perhaps someday I'll have time to work on finishing it.