Whats your favorite free open source software that everyone should try?

Sigmatank@midwest.social to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 420 points –

Lemmy seems like the right place to ask this. Personally I've really enjoyed Gurgle, which is a FOSS Wordle clone app.

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Blender is my favorite open source tool I wish I knew how to use :)
I’d love to use it for creating my own designs and took several attempts at learning it. But I always end up giving up on it due to lack of time and energy.

Did you use the youtube tutorials from the doughnut guy?

I tried to learn blender by just using it and googling the issues but gave up several times. Then I bit the bullet and went trough a proper video tutorial. Most of them run at increments of 10-20 minutes and each one reaches enough to be useful on its own.

Another tip is to do lots of tiny things you can reasonably make in a weekend before doing big things.

I prefer to use tutorials I can read and reference. But I’m willing to give videos a try if you say it’s a good one for a total beginner.
Could you give me a link?

I'm absolute with you on prefering written tutorials and documentation, however when it comes to beginner tutorials for Blender, there's simply nothing better than the doughnut tutorial from Blenderguru. It's not a "do this then do this" video - he's actually explaining what he does and why, so when you're finished, you actually have ideas of what to do with your own projects.

3D art is a complex thing - but you can actually get a long way following the doughnut tutorial, and after that, you may be open to try other video tutorials or have a look at other channels.

Link to the doughnut series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIoXOplUvAw&list=PLjEaoINr3zgFX8ZsChQVQsuDSjEqdWMAD

Another favorite of mine to mostly just watch is Grant Abbitt: https://www.youtube.com/@grabbitt/featured

Thank you for the information! I just need to put some dedicated time aside to learn this, but it looks like a good place to get started.

Take it a little at a time. The blenderguru videos are short and arr perfect for doing 30 mins today, 30 mins the next day - you don’t need to do it all in one sitting.

Yeah, Absolutely. https://youtu.be/nIoXOplUvAw?si=NsMPxjkNfcCfuf6I This guy. I haven't done the most recent tutorial he has made because he actually goes back and redoes the beginners tutorial to keep up with the most recent version but the earlier versions of this was great for me.

Thanks! Someone else already posted the link but I really appreciate you still following up on this. I can see now why you call him the doughnut guy :)

Blender has one of the hardest learning curves I have experienced so far. It simply does so much and there is so much to remember. It's worth it, but man, it's intense.