It's free open-source software, works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It gives great balance for drawing on grids (reduces arbitrary decisions) and usability (power to draw what you want). I've gotten several compliments at talks for diagrams made using this software, so I highly recommend it.
One thing I've noticed with Dia is that it simply doesn't launch for me. Does Dia require X11 on a Mac? If so, I couldn't find anything in the documentation stating this (although not launching on Windows is covered).
Likewise I'm a bit leery that Dia is requesting access to "system events".
Well it's bailing right now because of an rpath issue (which looks like it's been an issue for a few years now). Which is to say that this isn't really very encouraging for dia on OSX.
According to one of the siblings [1], Dia can export to LaTeX. I haven't used it myself, but a ddg search yields a promising workflow [2]. Myself, I usually export it to SVG, which I then use Inkscape to convert to PDF and include it in the LaTeX file that way.
It's free open-source software, works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It gives great balance for drawing on grids (reduces arbitrary decisions) and usability (power to draw what you want). I've gotten several compliments at talks for diagrams made using this software, so I highly recommend it.