Installing Blender

To install Blender on Linux, go to the Downloads and get the tarball link (it's currently blender-2.92.0-linux64.tar.xz from ftp.nluug.nl), then copy the link from the browser and wget it instead

• Explore release files in the FTP archive here
• untar with -J for xz tarballs (rather than -z for gzip tarballs that use -xzf)

cd ~/opt
TARBALL="https://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/graphics/blender/release/Blender2.92/blender-2.92.0-linux64.tar.xz"
wget -c $TARBALL
tar -xJf $(basename "$TARBALL") && rm $(basename "$TARBALL")
cd $(basename -s ".tar.xz" "$TARBALL")
BLENDER_PROG=$(readlink -f blender)
mkdir -p ../bin
cd ../bin
ln -s "$BLENDER_PROG"

This will put Blender on the command line but to get it on your start menu (for Linux Mint) you'll want a .desktop file, which is available on GitHub usually.

A little searching brings up the official blender/blender repo: release/freedesktop/blender.desktop

Removing the non-English language lines leaves:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Blender
GenericName=3D Modeller
Comment=3D modeling, animation, rendering and post-production
Keywords=3d;cg;modeling;animation;painting;sculpting;texturing;video editing;video
tracking;rendering;render engine;cycles;game engine;python;
Exec=/home/louis/opt/bin/blender %f
TryExec=/home/louis/opt/bin/blender
Icon=blender
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Graphics;3DGraphics;
MimeType=application/x-blender;

As explained in Linux desktop files, I keep my own repo of Desktops here, now I've added blender.desktop.

Place this file in the /usr/share/applications directory so that it is accessible by everyone, or in ~/.local/share/applications if you only wish to make it accessible to a single user. Which is used should depend on whether your application is installed systemwide or into a user's home directory. GNOME monitors these directories for changes, so simply copying the file to the right location is enough to register it with the desktop.

In this case I'm keeping it ~/.locally.

cd ~/.local/share/applications
wget "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lmmx/desktops/master/blender.desktop"

This should load the file immediately (if it doesn't show up something is wrong with your file, for me it was that I hadn't used the full path to the binary)