[kdheiwns]

The most impressive thing about Blender is how it feels like early 2000s-era creative software. And I mean that in a good way (blender was actually awful back then, but it's great now)

It opens instantly on my computer. It's fast. It's lightweight to the point my fans don't even spin up no matter what I do. It's customizable. It does everything I want to do and it never gets in the way of me trying to do my job. Meanwhile Photoshop these days randomly shows fucking popups about features and begs me to use its cloud scam, it's slower than it was 20 years ago without offering significantly better features, and the UI has somehow gotten worse when it was fine before. Blender does everything right. All I want is someone to take Blender's design philosophy and make a 2D image editor for desktop. Or hell, everything. I'm sick of bloat and BS in every damn app these days.

[cosmic_cheese]

IMO, Adobe suite peaked somewhere around CS1/CS2 (which ran happily on my single core 2Ghz iMac G5) and it’s been downhill ever since. A variant of CS2 that’d been feature frozen (aside from smaller technical improvements like wide gamut support) and ruthlessly optimized and bug-fixed up until present day would be vastly preferable to the trainwreck that is CC.

[-0_0-]

As a kid with no cash but a lot of passion, I spent months cobbling together a fully working version of Photoshop 7 (pre-CS days) from various files extracted from free demo and upgrade installers. Technically did nothing illegal and ran that single version for a good 18 years across various PCs, eventually powering a large media company's output with it (in fact there's a very good chance anyone reading this will have seen some of my Photoshop work given the reach of that company).

The main reason I never upgraded was that it was FAST, and until Adobe started rolling out AI features around 2020 there were almost no notable additions made to Photoshop other than new versions seemingly getting slower and arguably uglier. To this day I'll still occasionally boot up the old Photoshop 7 if I don't need to use content-aware fill, and I'll marvel at how zippy it feels.

[cosmic_cheese]

I spent a lot of time in a… not-quite-legitimate version of PS 7 too. Feels almost like a rite of passage for many of us of a certain age.

And yeah, 7 was quite efficient and zippy, basically just 6 with a few new features and compatibility with newer OSes (first version to run natively on OS X for example). Ran it on a 400Mhz G3 without issue, which would be futile to even attempt with modern versions.

[mghackerlady]

I feel like a project to make an adobe CS competitor, limited in scope to those early versions like CS1 or 2, could really get off the ground. I suspect for 99% of users, things added since the CS1/CS2 days aren't really used enough that not having them becomes a dealbreaker

[cosmic_cheese]

Fully agree.

I think this is true of a lot of software, really. Very few people need more out of their office suite than what’s available in MS Office 2000 for example, which is somewhat validated in the sheer popularity of GSuite (with e.g. Docs being little more than WordPad/TextEdit with collaboration bolted on).

In general I also think that fixed-feature projects are a woefully underexplored space in the FOSS scene, which is a shame because they’re structurally more sustainable than projects that endlessly add new features.

[pilgrim0]

Blender does open in a blink, it is scary how good it is. I share the exact same perception as yourself. In comparison, sometimes I need to use Fusion 360, and its performance is abysmal. I wish I could do parametric design in blender

[tjoff]

CAD Sketcher add-on adds parametric design to blender. Haven't used it but probably not ready for real use.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92QmjS-xDaI https://hlorus.github.io/CAD_Sketcher/

Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.

[tredre3]

CAD Sketcher for blender is definitely not ready to be used in a real capacity and it's been almost 5 years I think, so I don't have high hopes. I will keep trying it every now and then, however, because I really want this product.

> Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.

Because Fusion 360 is that much better than even the latest Freecad? Just because Freecad sucks less nowadays doesn't mean that Fusion 360 isn't simply a better product... Freecad 1.0 was too little too late. The only way it could gain traction in the hobby market is if Fusion 360 pulls the plug on its free version (again). And I say all this as a Freecad user.

[tjoff]

Not saying that Fusion 360 isn't a better product. But being at the mercy of autodesk to even be able to open old projects just sounds asinine to me.

And also such a deliberate ploy to try and undercut competition, which sadly has been working unreasonable well. Even after onshape shafted everyone which should have highlighted the obvious risks.

[hgoel]

I have played with CAD Sketcher, it's usable, but yes, not really good enough for serious use. Doesn't quite match up to FreeCAD after the significant improvements that has had over the past couple of years.

[neutronicus]

Replicating Parasolid in OSS is hard

[dominick-cc]

I have an older version of affinity photo that feels like this, but the new ones use cloud features I don't want so I don't upgrade

[robertoandred]

I wouldn’t call Blender’s UI particularly great either. The assumption that you have three mouse buttons and a separate number pad is pretty crazy.

[tredre3]

Three buttons mice have been the standard for well over 20 years. I'll give you that when blender was first released, three button mice were not common.

Those assumptions are only crazy if you're an Apple user or a laptop user who uses a touchpad to 3d model.

[somat]

As a tangent, the single greatest thing about my Lenovo laptop that I was not looking for when I bought it was that it has three physical buttons for the touchpad(or that pointer thing if you use it). I love X11 style middle click paste. So that middle button elevates it to the best feeling laptop I have ever used.

A note on that pointer thing, I don't use it much, instinctively going for the pad and as such sort of dismissed it. Until I was trying to use the laptop in moving vehicle where the pad was useless due to bouncing but the pointer, rock solid. I totally get it now. lesson: Touch screens sort of suck anyway but are really terrible in moving/bouncing vehicles.

[robertoandred]

Laptops have been outselling desktops for decades, and the idea that Apple users are some quirky tiny minority has been false for just as long.

Blender’s UI just makes bad assumptions.

[bluefirebrand]

It makes assumptions that people doing serious 3D work are not on a laptop and can afford a keyboard with a numpad.

Those aren't really bad assumptions.

[robertoandred]

They are silly assumptions, especially for an open-source project trying to gain mindshare.

[bluefirebrand]

What do you want them to do about it, exactly? 3D artwork is a complex activity that requires a lot of keys to have a useful keybinding setup. Some of those keys are going to be the numpad

Go look at Blender's default keybinds and tell me what you would change so the numpad wasn't really necessary. If you can simplify their keybinds I'm sure they would love to see your PR.

[mghackerlady]

Realistically, who among blenders target audience doesn't have 3 button mouses or a numpad? Numpads have been standard on desktop keyboards since the 80s, and any mouse sold today can at least kinda do middle click by clicking in the scroll wheel. Even a lot of laptops have numpads, and clever use of multitouch can emulate a middle click.

Mostly unrelated, but jesus christ you people are uberfocused on mindshare without stopping to think about who your product would actually be useful for

[rmunn]

I prefer larger screens on laptops, so every laptop I've ever owned has had a numpad. Naturally you can't fit a numpad onto a 12" laptop, but USB (or Bluetooth) numpads are available; a quick Amazon search says $10-20 for most of them.

Plus, Blender has an "Emulate Numpad" option that lets you map the numpad controls onto your regular numeric keys (making it harder to use them for their normal purpose, so I wouldn't recommend it unless an external numpad is not an option for some reason). And they have an "Emulate 3 Button Mouse" option, where the middle mouse button can be emulated by holding down Alt while clicking the left mouse button. (Which means that some Alt+LMB shortcuts become unavailable, so again, the best option is to plug in a USB or Bluetooth mouse).

They've thought of it. Their defaults remain the default for a good reason, because the hardware to properly use the default shortcuts is cheap. But they've also accommodated the people who don't want to buy an external numpad or mouse.

[ben-schaaf]

Blender has multiple options for emulating a middle mouse button. I can use blender just fine on my laptop with a touchpad.

As for the numpad you can use the tilde key or alt+drag to switch views. There's also a handy gizmo.

[mghackerlady]

Those are, and at the time of blenders creation were, assumptions that should be made for workstations. Things objectively work better with more buttons

[BostonFern]

It’s not open-source, but I enjoy using Affinity, especially the updated version after it was acquired by Canva.