A lot of the programming that I do for fun is programming challenges like Advent of Code. They’re more like games or puzzles than projects. You don’t have to wrestle with build tools or old libraries or other people’s crappy code or learn complicated frameworks.

I like the art of programming. I like to find elegant ways to express ideas. I like to learn new paradigms and language features that allow me to think differently about problems. It’s nice to find a way to make the code readable by matching the code to the problem statement.

Or there’s the challenge of fluent style, where instead of the code reading in the typical programming style with caveman grammar, you go out of your way to make read like English.

Something as simple as using Shell Scripting to automate tasks (say, rename all files in a directory according to a certain pattern) is programming in Linux and most of these you can even do directly in the shell (i.e. just type a few lines of code on the command line directly, no need to have a file with the program or do any kind of compilation).

Also it’s stupidly simple to program in certain languages like Perl and Python in Linux mainly because you’re just working in the command line interface and most of what those languages do is that kind of thing (rather than graphical UI stuff), those languages come almost invariably pre-installed in Linux distros, and you can use the same trick as with shell scripting of just starting the interpreter and type the code directly to run it.

Beyond that, if you’re actually doing stuff like server-side software development, Linux is overwhelmingly dominant in that space and it’s way simpler to, when targetting Linux servers, to just work on your own Linux as developer (user) machine because all the tools for remote access to Unix machines are there nativelly and work seamlessly, plus you can can have the developer machine double as a development environment for server side development (as Linux can still act as a server machine even when you’re running it as a user machine).

I like microcontrollers. It is fun to see code do physical things. Plus, you can learn how simple computers work, which helps get an understanding of regular ones. Combine that with home automation, and you have an infinite time sink.

Most embedded systems programming software runs nicely on Linux (or sometimes even exclusively). PlatformIO, Arduino IDE, STM Cube, ESP-IDF… Obviously, something like a Raspberry Pi (and its alternatives) runs Linux itself.

Although, quite often, I find myself saying that since 90% of work and hobbies is either in a browser (including electron) or a shell anyways. Doesn’t really matter how the task bar / dock looks when all you do is run the same 10 programs

I like to solve everyday problems through programming. My primary way of doing it is just Python on Windows right now, but Linux does make programming languages a bit easier to access. (And most of the stuff I write would easily run on Linux too.)

Every time I go “damn, this is more complicated/boring than it needs to be and the manual handling is so unnecessary, I wish I could automate this”, I start making a script.

For example, I’m an amateur photographer, so I have scripts for dealing with photos. One is a photo importer/backup tool, because I didn’t trust the importers in the apps to do it right (Adobe trauma). I’m writing scripts for report purposes. One script I wrote puts all of the photos I have on the map.

I just want to learn it to know it

Acquiring a skill just to have it isnt how it works. Skills are perishable, meaning you will unlearn them just as easy. Of course much experience would take a long time but still.

I suggest imagining what you could do with programming. What little problems do you face that could be solved by programming?

You also dont need to write another operaring system or debug “a whole game”. If you decide you want to learn programming (because its fun or because you like to create and fix shit), you can make an app run on your computer or phone that didnt run before. I did exactly that and my programming skills are pretty small. You dont have to know all the algorithms or study it to do useful stuff with it.

I made a couple text based games, solved some advent of code riddles and so on. Its fun and it helps seeing the world as a canvas instead of a fixed structure that is applied to you.

Sounds like you want a project.

You could try making a game. Python has pygame. Godot is a bit of a steeper learning step but has a lot of capabilities. I’ve messed around with each for fun.

Web dev can also be fun, and a very different style of coding. I’ve made things for a loved one who wanted some things for a site they run. Each thing they asked for took me no more than a day but saved them having to hire someone. I also made a little one-file site that I could share with some people as an RPG reference.

There are also coding games, as in games where you write code as part of the gameplay. These can help in that they give you a goal. Known names include computercraft mod for minecraft, screeps as both mmo and arena battle, Shenzhen I/O and other Zachtronics and zach-like games, The Farmer Was Replaced, etc.

And of course, you can always just think of something. I’ve written a few scripts to do simple edits to files, like ‘open each file in the folder this is run in and change blahblah to bloobloo and increment the version number’ or batch renaming files. Did one to find duplicate files and list them for organization/deletion.

I have other things I’ve started but never finished, but I enjoyed working on them, and they weren’t my job, so no worries.

I started out with games and simulators. I tended just to come up with some game logic and then see what happened when I let it play out with many entities. When I started my computer science degree at uni I tended to write more code that had something to do with recent lecture material. Implementing Distance Vector Routing, messing around with compression, applying reinforcement learning to my own games.

Now that I have a job it’s a bit harder to stay motivated for all this, but it’s still kinda the same. I just write whatever my brain comes up with.

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.

Something like Automate the Boring Stuff might be a good option for what you want. Programming is just another tool to solve a problem.

For example, I hated when I would archive an unread email, it would remain as unread. So I created a script to mark any archived emails as read, and that script runs every couple of hours.

You will never know enough to make a whole program when you never start. Programming small things is very different to big things. You could also try making small changes to big things.

If you use computers enough, from time to time you’ll run into things that make you think “I wish there was a better/easier/faster way to do this”. Then if you know how to program, you can just create a tool to do it for you.

For example, I once made a small calculator app that allowed math on time values instead of basic numbers, so if I did 47*2 it would show 01:34 instead of 94. Some other time I worked some place that played background music all over the building, but something as simple as skipping the current music required going through 4-5 screens in some internal software, so I made a tool that went through those screens for me with a single button click.

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.

You need a Bob Ross programming series. A little C here and more Python there.

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