About me
I'm a student from Timișoara, Romania, interested in programming and computers in general.
I use GNU/Linux Mint on all 3 of my computers. I like it because it's easy to use but without compromising on customisation, and that the developers are very engaged with the community (I've even had a conversation with Clement Lefebvre, the lead developer of Linux Mint; can you have one with Tim Cook, Pavan Davuluri, or even Mark Shuttleworth?).
I do disagree with some of the decisions made by the Linux Mint team, and I'm probably going to make my own Debian Testing-based distribution in the future, but that's only because of other reasons, I would still be happy to use Linux Mint.
I believe GNU/Linux only lacks the promotion it deserves. Unless it gets some promotion (think advertising, pre-installation on computers etc.), even from a specific distributor, or a miracle happens, the paradox will remain: people don't use GNU/Linux because it doesn't have enough software, and software developers don't make software for it because it's not popular enough.
I prefer using libre software when practical (so phones are an exception, because there's no libre phone that's at a decent price with decent hardware; I still want a libre phone so much, but wasting 1 year to get GNU/Linux on a 4-year-old phone isn't OK for me).
I don't want a GNU/Linux phone for privacy or any specific feature; I want it because I want to have control over my phone and do anything the hardware is capable of. Androids aren't smartphones, they're Java phones that happen to use the Linux kernel.
I do web development, the old-school way, with Flask, Jinja2, HTML, plain CSS and JS. I don't do SPAs because you have to duplicate your logic, and also reimplement the browser's features. I hate the trend of everything being a SPA, including static sites, e-commerce, blogs, GitHub, and more. I have no plans to learn React, Angular, Vue, or Svelte. Also, I don't design UIs with Figma or similar tools, I just write an initial version in code and iterate on it.
It's fine that SPAs exist, but they should only be used when building something like Google Maps, Google Sheets, games or other things that update a lot.
I do enjoy using htmx for AJAX-like updates, I write my own JS when I really need it, and I like using WebAssembly with MicroPython for interactive features. MicroPython loads in less than 500ms, even on Androids.
Besides web development, I do other things in Python. I write GTK apps for the GNU/Linux desktop (not GNOME), small CLI tools and I train AIs for image recognition. I'm also trying to get into game development.
I also do C++, mainly for competitive programming (in the Romanian Olympiad of Informatics, only C/C++ is allowed), and I'm trying to expand my knowledge of C++ to GTK and make my own interpreter for an object-oriented language.
I haven't tried Rust and Go, and I have no plans to learn them. OO (the Python and Smalltalk way, not the forced Java way) makes a lot of sense to me and I don't understand changing it for the sake of change.
I'm also interested in electronics and robotics, but I don't have the time and money to get into them.