visual studio codeeee VSC is a lifesaver. every computer should come preinstalled with VSC man fuck microsoft office and candy crush why dont we have VSC installed. its a text editor thats also an IDE sort of that's also got github and a terminal you can enable. download it now
cobalt toolsis a funny cat themed video downloader that lets you get stuff off twitter/tiktok/instagram/whatever without selling your body and soul by downloading an app. theres no ads. theres no fuck shit. its just downloading. everyone should be kissing the dev of this website sloppy style.
guthib . github is a badass website that you probably know about and dont know how to use. well don't worry my sweet summer prince child . because theres an easy way and I will learn you it now.
giiithub desktop is a kinda crusty GUI for github. "how does this help me and how do i use it?" okay so essentially git tracks a folder. you have those on your computer probably. and the way it does so is with git files in that folder. and it'll sync those files with the website files (called a repository) and let multiple people work together. and its SO easy to make and manage a repository when you realize this. if youre doing a project with multiple people or one where you have a lot of files you want to track and have history for, use git. please. Also also if you dont like github desktop there's bitbucket and sourcetree, neither of which I have touched in eons.
paint dot net is a handy dandy image editing software. its pretty light and well-balanced between the "art" and "utility" side of things, its free, its got extensions, every computer should also have this. as i said its kinda light but i've never really needed anything heavier.
godot is like unity but open source (cool and based). I use godot and if you wanna make games its a good place to start. like all the cool kid software there's also github integration which is badass.
w3 schools and geeks for geeks are two very nice very handy online resources for learning literally any programming idea/language under the sun. they are like twins in my mind.
speaking of twins desmos and symbolab are two very nice math resources. desmos is super helpful for plotting out/playing with systems of equations (for example finding a good curve for acceleration behaviors in video games) and symbolab is a kind of ass but still oftentimes helpful formula solver.
blenda is a 3d modelling software youve probably heard of already. It is a little difficult to get into. I had to "learn" blender 3 times before actually learning how to use it. In essence, you create new nodes by cutting, then shape those nodes, then merge those nodes or dissolve them to reduce or attach form. of course there's more than that but once you have the basics you can make anything by adding/manipulating/deforming the features of a cube. there's also sculpt mode where you really only use the orange tools but it relies on you already having a basic shape so #swagever
there's also sketchup, which is fairly intuitive and in-broswer. TinkerCAD is a second free in-browser website but as someone with like 6k hours in it I cannot in good faith suggest using it as a place to start. Tinkercad uses such a completely different set of skills and techniques that aren't very transferrable. If you're looking for more power head over there but don't do so to start.
flash point has all the flash games archived on it. you could spend a year in flashpoint and never reach the bottom. jesus christ there's so much flash content that just withered and died when adobe pulled the plug. preserve our history.
wikipedia is a website that I'm sure you already know about. but it's worth mentioning that I go there for my software recommendations. normal search engines will give you paid and freemium garbage but there's Soul in the wikipedia software pages
lmms and audacity are where I go for my music/sound editing. they're both allright and free.
kden live is what i use to edit my videos, but it's kind of highly mediocre, takes eons to load, AND will cry and throw a tantrum if you move even a single file that it referenced for a video to a different folder. I'm probably going to switch to davinci resolve but im also lazy so there's that.
twine is a pretty cool web app/normal app that I don't fully understand. It's used for web design but also not but also is. There's CSS and javascript integration. I don't understand it but my IMD professors really like it so it's probably a me thing. On the topic of javascript holla to the million billion javascript libraries out there that let you do basically Anything just by importing scripts.