KiCad for electronics development.

Blender for 3D graphics.

Gimp for photo editing.

Inkscape for illustration.

Though I'd recommend FreeCAD over OpenSCAD as a 3D modeling tool for most users as an alternative to traditional CAD tools...and therein lies the distro problem.

Gimp is really not great for photo editing IMO - it really shines at photo manipulation. (i.e. it is Photoshop, not Lightroom.)

For RAW development (a la Lightroom), DarkTable and RawTherapee exist. I've only tried the former, and found it incredibly difficult to use.

I also prefer Krita for digital illustration (though maybe that's unfair - it's best at digital painting specifically.) Of course, if you need vector support, Inkscape is the obvious answer.

Good points.

I was trying to think of unusual programs with non-standard approaches.

Perhaps rather than FreeCAD either BRL-CAD, or maybe the recently announced Dune 3D:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228068

Also, Blender w/ CADsketcher (the Solvespace solver) is quite good:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34856383

Though maybe Solvespace would be a better match?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33571555

drawio for diagrams

But why do you even need a distro to begin with just to ship certain software set? Install Arch/Gentoo and install whatever is your preferred software of choice, or hell, you can even do that on any other distro.

The value a dedicated distro provides here is that you don’t have to do the legwork to research and find the best tools.

As power users we may want to do that ourselves, but a lot of people place value in having that curation done for them.

I think it would be an interesting thing for a distro to market/focus on, and it might help to find/identify/encourage additional such software.

Isn’t that basically package groups (or whatever the district-specific terms are)?

Eg Im pretty sure Ubuntu Desktop has some kind of “Productivity” package group that includes a word processor and spreadsheets and an email client and what not. I’m pretty sure it’s selected by default when you do a full desktop install. I don’t recall what the actual software is, but I would imagine LibreOffice.

I would agree with OP that it doesn’t really make sense for a distro, though. People really want to “make a distro” for some reason so we end up with silly shit like Kubuntu (Ubuntu… with KDE pre-installed).

My general rule of thumb is if I can point the distro’s OS package manager to the distro’s upstream (ie Ubuntu for Kubuntu, or Debian for Ubuntu) and everything works or mostly works, it should be a script or apt repo and not a distro.

There are way too many “Ubuntu but with a different default DE” distros that could really just be a modified install ISO or post-install script.

A pkg group is enough.

I tend to use AlternativeTo for that.

For example: https://alternativeto.net/software/pyspread/

When would you take OpenSCAD over Blender?

OpenSCAD is really good for parametric designs. One of the first things I designed in OpenSCAD was a bicycle sprocket where you could input how many teeth you wanted, link length, how thick, etc. and OpenSCAD would generate the sprocket according to those parameters. I recall seeing a while back that blender was adding support for this kind of thing so I'm sure it's possible, but it was very intuitive in OpenSCAD.

For any large project I'm sure Blender (or FreeCAD) would be a better choice, but as someone with some programming background just starting out, OpenSCAD feels way more accessible.

I've tried a lot of 3D software over the years, and OpenSCAD has been the one I've been most successful with (along w/ Carbide Create, but I work for that company....)

Currently working on a library which makes the two work together:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

(which is currently quite primitive/basic, and even when fully developed is not likely to be used by anyone else)

Blender wasn't originally designed to be used for CAD type applications. It's possible of course, but you're likely better off with something specifically meant for precision CAD models. Specifically for 3d printing, I don't think blender is ideal.

I think most programmers like OpenSCAD - what better way to make parametric CAD models than by writing code?

My understanding is that with CAD software you can go backwards and have (near?) infinite edit history, in a way you cannot with Blender. Which makes it very, very useful.

A lot of cad software actually has an editable history: you can go back 100 steps and modify a dimension or a step and have the rest of the model updated to take that new dimension into account.

I wouldn’t work with any cad software that didn’t have that ability.

This is called parametric design. Since CAD programs do not operate on meshes, this allows you to e.g. change the dimension on some part and have the rest adjust accordingly.

How well this works depends on the situation, if changing a parameter causes new faces to appear on the object this is usauayvwry difficult to handle, even for commercial CAD programs.

Blender can't do CAD. At least it can't do what you would want to do in a CAD program.

The most important difference is that Blender operates on meshes, CAD programs don't.

Debian should do.

anything that replaces powerpoint?

If you're a hardcore LaTeX user there's beamer.

I think there are a plug-ins for Inkscape for presentations.