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What is really meant by "programming" when people say they like to use linux for it?

I've always wanted to understand what is actually meant by this. I have wanted to get into programming for years, did some basic python and c, but could never really progress. Not necessarily a linux question but I know since most distros come with libraries already, it's popular to use for programming.

I have trouble understanding what people are actually programming if it isn't their job. Like, you go to your computer and start working on...what? I don't know enough to make an entire program or debug a game, so im just unsure what people do especially when starting out.

Also I don't really want to learn it for a job. I just want to learn it to know it. But im not sure how to apply it to anything realistic.

30 comments

  • So, I make things for myself to replace commercial software that either doesn't exist or that is becoming (or will become) enshittified like all commercial software.

    I like to cook, for instance. It's a hobby of mine. Cooking, BBQ, grilling, baking, all of it. So of course, I have recipes and they are important to me. I could spend all my time painstakingly entering all my recipes into recipes dot com or whatever, right? But of course, as soon as I do that, their barely usable app that does almost everything I want (and a hundred things I don't give a shit about) gets updated in the third update of the week (rolleyes) and they have completely changed the UI and on top of that, they removed a feature that I used daily.

    OR - I could just make my own fucking app. Which I did. It's awesome, it does everything I need and nothing I don't. It also doesn't update every thirty seconds and become less and less usable or require me to completely overhaul my workflow because the programming staff and middle management need to justify their existences.

    I also recently made a wishlist extension for Firefox, because Amazon removed the ability to add non-Amazon items to their wishlist. I have probably a dozen other ideas I'm working on at any given time. None of this is to make money, but just to make my life more convenient and unplug myself from the wider (bullshit) Internet as much as possible.

    • Tangential but you might find TiddlyWiki useful, it's a single file personal wiki that can be edited in any web browser.

  • For me it's:

    Oh shit, that last update borked my computer... wth is postfix? How was it corrupted? Whatever... How do I reinstall it... [look up answer an Ask Ubuntu- Copy/Paste]; okay cool. Wait, losing postfix also broke my graphics driver?! Why? Whatever... I guess I should reinstall it... [look up answer an Ask Ubuntu- Copy/Paste]; okay cool.

    Then I forget everything I just did because Ubuntu rarely breaks and also I think it was just my ssd dying...

  • I like to automate processes I keep repeating on my machine. For example, there are some documents I receive every month, like bank statements and phone bills. Since the naming conventions of those files are atrocious, I wrote a little program to automatically fix those for me

    Some people also like participating in the development of open source software. That requires you to be a somewhat decent programmer already, though, as you'll have to work with integrated systems

  • I wrote a little bit of code to tell me if or when my electricity would be cheaper if I used on demand pricing instead of flat rate. Basically anything you might use excel for could be a programming problem.

    For other hobby projects and "why Linux" it's easier to sew things together than windows, generally speaking.

    Example:

    Every time I sit down at my PC the first thing I usually do is open a terminal: it is both my launcher and my file manager. I have several programs with TUI (terminal user interface) or text based API (which is an applied programming interface) and I keep my notes in plain text. One type of note I keep is an "atomic" note inside my zettelkasten (this is a fancy way of keeping track of ideas and the way they connect together, but you need to revisit them for it to be useful. Kinda like anki / spaced reputation I guess).

    So enough background, here's the idea and the programming:

    • If I always open a terminal, it's a good place to put stuff I want to see.
    • There are two things I want to see: twice a day I want to see a note, the rest of the time I want to see the 3 or 4 most important tasks on my todo list
    • I want randomized notes and I want it to be automatic.

    One of the easiest things you can do in a terminal is "echo" text. So I started by, in my terminal "rc" file (the configuration file that tells the terminal what to do when you start it) echoing my todo list as the very last step in the start process. Then it's refinement. First don't give me the whole list, use shell tools to show the head of the list. Now make a conditional statement that says "if there's a file called "temp" in some folder give me the Todo list, otherwise do nothing". Basically we follow the incremental logic train until you get the final product:

    • If no file exists, print a note (at random) and then make the file
    • If the file exists write part of the todo list
    • Every 6 hours, delete the file automatically with cron

    Neat you just programmed a lame, but useful tool.

  • Linux lets\makes you interact with a terminal (and just OS tinkering) more, so you become a bit more comfortable with writing simple commands and then code.

    One of the things for basic Python and default libs is sorting your Downloads folder into a more logical filestructure that doesn't need reshuffling and searching for long. Move pictures into Pictures and sort them accordingly to the year\month you saved them for example. Make the script run once a week. Make it write a log file as it runs.

    I did this one for the sake of it, but then I needed a piece of code to bruteforce the PDF file password protection, so I used a lib to access and resave this file without a password. On every attempt to open it, it inserted another password from either freely availiable databases of simple passes or well-known leaks (rockyou). It worked nice for PDFs I needed to crack to, actually, just print on paper, but also worked when I tested it with combinations of random words and symbols I came up with. I needed a lib to open a pdf, a list of passwords to try (althought, a bit pre-formatted), and a couple of victims to test on.

  • Instead of a long-winded post, here's a quick list of stuff that I've worked on in my free time over the last few months:

    • Some scripts to automatically set some metadata on my photo library
    • A tool that grabs a video stream from an HDMI input (from the OS's point of view that looks just like any webcam), finds text in it and overlays a translation. I use that to play Japanese visual novels on my Switch
    • A simple Bubble Shooter game because my gf was frustrated with some bugs in the one she had found online
    • A simple 2D game engine and editor inspired by RPG Maker XP
    • Updates to the registration website for a community event that I host twice a year
    • Updates to a discord bot that automates some dice rolls for my online TTRPG sessions
    • A browser extension that helps me scrape some data from a specific website
    • Helped a friend port an old website from PHP5 to PHP8

    Overall, it's mostly stuff that is useful for my hobbies for which I can't find an existing solution that fits my use case.

    • To add some more, here's a list of stuff that I would love to do at some point but haven't found the time yet:

      • A tool that directly translates PCB designs into a format that my resin 3D printer can read so I can abuse its display as a UV etching machine
      • An alternative to GPlates that's a bit easier to use for fantasy worldbuilding. GPlates is great but it's mostly meant for serious scientific work so its UI is a bit complicated.
      • A minimalistic blogging platform that interfaces with ActivityPub
      • Many, many games.

  • If you want examples of what people work on check out the public github repositories, they range from big open source projects with multiple developers, testers, etc to small projects only one person has worked on.

    Many languages/build chains will provide template projects these days to give you some baseline to build from instead of an empty directory. Maven archetypes for example in Java or https://start.spring.io/ for spring projects in Java/kotlin/groovy. But that's just to give you some structure and frameworks so you're not starting with a blank canvas.

    Different languages will appeal to different practices too, like a compiled language you'll want to leverage debuggers and logging, but an interactive language, or one that offers both compiled and interactive, may have a REPL or command line prompt to work against to try out ideas before saving them in a script or class file.

  • I do some programming as a hobby. I'm far from being an expert or even competent at it. You work on whatever you WANT to work on. Sometimes this can be born from necessity, you need your computer to do something, but you can't find any existing application that does the specific thing that you need. Sometimes maybe you just want to create something, just because it seems interesting to you, or just because.

    So just for example, one of my hobbies involves working with video. Years ago, I was frustrated with the options available for encoding my videos into h264, so I ended up creating my own GUI around FFMPEG. It was easy enough and effective for what I needed, that the tool became quite popular among others in my hobby.

    Recently, machine learning has made it possible to do cool stuff like remove the background from a video clip. A lot of this stuff is really difficult to even get working, let alone to use effectively. So a current project I'm working on is a GUI for such a tool to make it really easy to use.

    So yeah... First I would say you need to figure out what you want to do. Why do you want to write a program? What do you want to accomplish?

    Then you need to learn the basics of programming in whatever language you intend to use. And just gain a basic understanding of how programming works in general. Once you know enough to be dangerous, you can start working on something. Getting started is the hardest part, and involves really thinking about your problem, breaking it down into smaller parts, and considering how to solve each of those small parts. This can involve lots of research, lots of googling, and finding frameworks or libraries that might help you accomplish what you need.

    LLMs like chatgpt have also been amazing in helping people like me to create something much more quickly than before. I can ask it for thoughts on how to accomplish a specific thing, or even have it write entire sections of code for me. Just yesterday, I had it create a script for me which I estimate would have taken me 10-20 hours to write on my own. However, they don't always give right answers, so it's really important to have a basic level of understanding of programming so that you can understand the code that it gives you. I don't use any code until I understand how it works. The LLM can also help explain the code to you!

  • This feels more like two questions, so I'll answer them both:

    1. When I'm not programming for my job, I'm programming one of many side projects I have going on at any time. Same with any other professional who has a career in their hobby. These are often projects I think would be useful to me and I believe would let me learn new skills.
    2. I use Linux (and MacOS) because the Unix environment, particularly the command line tooling is far superior to Windows. Developers often work on Unix, so they build their tools for the platform and thus improvements stack up. I also just like the FOSS philosophy underpinning most Linux.

    If you're trying to learn programming and know at least some basics, my only advice is to pick a project you're even a little interested in and get started. Don't worry about operating system, it doesn't actually matter that much unless you're working on iOS or MacOS! A weather app for whatever language/platform you're working with is usually my first suggestion for students.

  • That's the most difficult problem in hobby programming: finding a project. Most interesting things seem to complex to start.

    The solution is to say f it I'm going to try. Right now I'm very slowly making progress learning Rust by writing a program to trade cryptocurrency. It took a while for me to even take my goals seriously as something I am capable of. It's half gambling and half skills development but 100% interesting enough that I have consistently come back to it. I've come to terms with the fact that the only money it will make me is if I get a better job by becoming a rust developer.

    The Linux side of programming only really comes into play when you want to do networking, drivers, or esoteric filesystem intensive stuff. Windows and MacOS are capable of basically the same things. The main benefit of using Linux for development is that most open source projects are built by developers for development on Linux based systems, so getting dependencies has an easy one line command someone already figured out. For your situation I suspect the most important thing is how cool it feels when you use it. There's something about setting up an operating system the way you want that keeps me coming back for more.

30 comments