Blender and buy a 3D printer afterwards
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Emacs
You can do really neat thinga in QGIS -- like make your own professional quality maps, make map animated gifs, etc
idk the software but multitrack audio editing sounds fun.
some suggestions for your consideration in order of empowerment and learning curve first,
- AWK
- ffmpeg (~ & imagemagick ?)
- bash, zsh, or fish
- kew (it's just a really simple nice tui music player, no fuss). (... "Am I the only fun one in Digit's list here?" -- kew)
n_n
Some other things that sprang to mind, (generally tending to more gui things, some distro/packagemenent things)... audacity/tenacity, fontforge, gimp, gentoo and portage, bedrocklinux and brl, peertube self hosting, forgefed self hosting, suckless.org's tools, CRUX or KISS/Carbs, just playing around in stellarium, playing around in pioneer space sim, learning how to evade humanity's detection as an ai in the game called singularity, ;3
Oh... Here's an idea for you... Learn a text editor.
Think it's not fun?
Depends on which text editor you pick, and how much the fun suits you. ... Emacs has so many things (including games, like tetris and doctor). Even neovim has some extra things (~ opencode runs on neovim... tho it's not the same, lol). Or maybe you want something simpler, like nano, mcedit, or fin (I wrote fin, don't use it, it's scruffy... and only able to do that from learning some of the things mentioned, and more).
Yay for learning. Yay for asking for what other fun things to learn. Good post. Good question. ... Sorry my answers were not better. Heh. Caught off guard, answered just what first sprang to mind. n_n Doubtless many other more fun things exist.
vi
or vim with vimtutor
Ansible
sunvox
I'd say GIMP for photo editing would be a good one to learn. It's come in handy in a pinch both at home and at work when I've needed something done up real quick.
FreeCAD
Mango jelly on YouTube
I came here to recommend frecad too!
Second this. Not because I have experience in it, but because I'm learning it this week so I could have a friend 3D print a part for my car, as I'm deleting some original equipment and now need something that doesn't exist as a spare part.
Yes def freecad its really fun to fuck aound in
CRRCSim (RC plane simulator)
Learn how to slope-soar a glider.
Best with the photo mountain scenery added in.
In many distro repositories too.
Meshtastic (Software and hardware).
Adding to that, since I work at a computer I was never motovated to stay at tbe same place to learn blender so I changed to Nomad Sculpt at the tablet and I love it, I can do it from my couch (or toilet lol). It is a different aproach tho
It is tradition (and fun) to start your Blender journey with the Donut Tutorial.
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Docker and Docker Compose. Once you know that, you'll be able to self host almost any FOSS.
Take it one step farther and learn podman and quadlets. It's like learning docker/compose, but it's also rootless if you do it from userspace.
Docker can also be run rootless, though not by default.
True, but I personally don't see the point in adding a bunch of new packages to a system to make it work the way another system does when the migration process is minimal.
Using podman compose, I've migrated multiple docker compose to rootless with basically no required refactoring until I made it a quadlet so it would always just run.
I've never understood why Docker doesn't work like that by default.
libreoffice if your using excel.
Learn Krita. David Revoy, artist of Pepper and Carrot, has a ton of great tutorials on using it.
Reminds, there's mypaint too.
Yeah. Krita, mypaint, I neglect, living 99% of the time in gimp.
“Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.”
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Bash. If you use Linux.
OpenFOAM. If you ever want to figure out the aerodynamic qualities of a cow. This may take more than a weekend.
I know you said software, but I would like to suggest a musical instrument. They still require learning a new language and typically provide a huge level of self satisfaction. A cheap keyboard or guitar can provide literally thousands of hours of study.
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OpenSCAD. 3D modeling as code.
I've gotten a lot out of it, and their tutorial is excellent.
How does this compare to FreeCAD or CAD in general?
It's very unique in the CAD space. It's almost more akin to a hardware definition language like VHDL than it is a traditional CAD solution.
You don't ever do any direct manipulation of your model through visual tools. There is a visualizer so that you can see your model, but all changes are done via plaintext editing of the model's definition file.
This has a lot of advantages, not the least of which is being able to version control your 3D models.
It has some disadvantages as well, in that some transforms that are easy in a traditional CAD software are a little more manual in OpenSCAD. I've definitely had to dust off my highschool trigonometry once or twice to get something the way I wanted it.
Specifically with regards to FreeCAD. I found FreeCAD to be a little inaccessible. It's unintuitive at best, and I found it unpleasant to work with, as it was exceptionally fiddly. OpenSCAD feels far more intuitive to me, but I also have a software engineering background. I think OpenSCAD may be trickier for someone without that, but it's hard to say.
Thank you for the thoughtful explanation!
Is it perfect? Nope.
Is it useful? Yep.
Is it fun to play with? Most definitely!
Oh yes... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4 (keep watching. Is relevant.) [... and oddly relevant to my earlier suggestion list that also included emacs]
I really like openscad! It maps well to how I think through modeling a part. I was just using it yesterday
Kubernetes (ala k3s) you can make any collection of computers a cluster and play with automation of apps and services
KiCAD play with circuit board design with FOSS.
FPGA programing! Tons of use case for when you need near line speed but can't afford the time and money it takes to build a full ASIC.
Godot. Start with an idle game, move onto more. Just don't make a horror game, way too many of those and a lot of them are bad.
Or a rogelike/light! Really hard as starter project
PosteRazor, is super easy to learn.
It can make wall posters, by printing the A4 segment sheets, and then gluing them together.
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