I’ve finally reached a brick wall where I can’t just find something on Printables/Thingiverse that I can modify for my use case. Until now, I’ve been able to find something close and use OrcaSlicer to make small adjustments or occasionally kit bash two models together.
Now, it seems, I need to design something from scratch.
I’ve had Blender recommended, but I just cannot make sense of it no matter how many Youtube videos make it look so easy.
I’ve also got FreeCAD installed but am still getting my bearings and nothing has come of it yet.
So, recommendations? The only limitations are that it has to run on Linux and not be a cloud service. I’m willing to pay for a license if need be but no SaaS or having to fight with Wine to get it going.


Oh, one other thing I wished I knew earlier: There’s all these drawing tools in the sketcher like line and multi line and arc and whatever. And coming from something like Inkscape I thought there was a similar sort of “path” concept, but there really isn’t. Every line is just a line on its own, just with constraints from its endpoint to the end of the next line. But you get those automatically when clicking with the line tool too! So early on, if I messed something up, I’d feel the need to delete the whole “path” and draw it right. Dumb. Just delete whatever line you need to delete, draw any other lines with any tool makes sense, and it’ll be equivalent. Just do whatever, the system doesn’t care and can’t tell them apart anyway.
Obviously if something downstream is depending on the position of that line that might mess up those constraints, but that was more likely to happen when deleting all the lines rather than just the one problematic one I forgot to make as a curve or whatever.