Ask Lemmy

How did you learn inkscape?

Blender

SQL - understanding how to interact with databases will be an incredibly useful skill for whatever rabbit hole you next want to fall down.

Factorio

Learn Krita. David Revoy, artist of Pepper and Carrot, has a ton of great tutorials on using it.

Ardour, it's a FOSS Digital Audio Workstation

https://ardour.org/

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.

https://buttplug.io/

OpenSCAD. 3D modeling as code.

I've gotten a lot out of it, and their tutorial is excellent.

ssh and scp (secure connection and file transfer)

grep (the standard command-line search tool)

sed (Stream EDitor, good for find-replaces once you learn how to use it)

awk (can operate on text files or command output that's organized in columns)

sc (terminal-based spreadsheet)

trash (safer replacement for rm that moves things to your desktop's trash directory instead of deleting immediately)

FreeCAD

Blender and buy a 3D printer afterwards

vi

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.

Latex is worth knowing, its most commonly used for academic papers, but it opens up a whole world of scripting automated documents. But, to make it really interesting, throw in tikz and/or pgfplots for some interesting power tools. Tikz does A LOT, and is really powerful. But can definitely be overwhelming.

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.

Emacs

You can do really neat thinga in QGIS -- like make your own professional quality maps, make map animated gifs, etc

Docker and Docker Compose. Once you know that, you'll be able to self host almost any FOSS.

One week of keybr.com to improve touch typing skills, which should serve you across all your IT endeavours... Unless you choose to learn gimp and drawing stuff :P

You could get JOSM and become an OpenStreetMap editor. https://josm.openstreetmap.de/

Also install gentoo.

• MuseScore 4 is a (the!) free music notation software. It is genuinely fantastic. It's also a lot of fun, if you know some notation basics and want to play around.
• Darktable is a Raw photo editor in the vein of Lightroom. Except where lightroom is sleek, polished, user friendly and Adobe (🤮), Darktable is FOSS, and clearly so both in the design and functionality: it could easily make a UX designer cry, but if you're willing to give it a try, there does not exist a more potent raw editor on this earth. Lightroom is a toy in comparison. (Now whether you need that is another question... But I've been using it for more than 10 years, and am still finding new, incredibly useful sub-menus, drop-down contexts on hidden sliders,...)
• rmpc is a really cool TUI music player

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.

My suggestion already submitted was Blender, but any of these ideas require a purpose. I don't think you truly learn an application or language (even human languages!) if you don't have something you're trying to do with it. Even music (it's a language), you can learn how to play something, how to put together notes and sounds, but you really start figuring out how to do things when you have a need to accomplish.

I would say 90% of my coding and application knowledge comes from decades of having a need or inspiration to do something, and having to find the right tool and learn how to use it to make my idea become something (even if it doesn't get finished). When that purpose or desire disappears (for whatever reason) I stop wanting or caring about learning more about the tool I was using to do it with.

Your initial request seems to point to a different style of learning, wanting to do it for the journey itself. That's cool, I just wonder if you had a reason for doing it, would it make the effort more fun and worthwhile.

Learn the basics of a couple of FOSS audio-software staples.

LMMS - tracker

Audacity - Audio recorder

Ansible

Lilypond. Its music software. Learning it will keep you occupied for at least a week.

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.

Sketching 3D in FreeCAD.

libreoffice if your using excel.

Meshtastic (Software and hardware).

There's always software reverse engineering. As bad as it may sound to some people, the US NSA has a github repositroy for a tool known as Ghidra, under Apache 2.0 license, so you can look at the source code and determine whether or not it's spyware. If it's actually NSA quality, you know it should be good enough for reverse engineering old software that won't land you in trouble if found out by the original devs. Last update was 2 months ago.

I tried a little bit but have yet to go very far at all with it since I am an idiot who thinks he's smarter than he really is.

Though, taking a page from your book, I am interested in looking up rekordbox now.

Get your finances in order with Firefly III and Waterfly III (Android app, available in F-Droid)

One thing I want to learn which seems important to me career wise is HEC-RAS, a hydrological River Analysis Software. I think it's free?

From this you can build your own predictions of when flooding (or drought!) will occur in your local area

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.