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.

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

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.

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.

I write Python for fun, I’m not a programmer. The more you learn, the more you can do. I’ve written a lot of scripts and tools to help me automate tasks I do frequently. It’s a lot of fun to dream up an idea and then make it real, and then later add random features that pop into my head. Windows sucks.

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.

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 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 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!

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

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.

I currently write a number of little programs, each running on a small processor that lights up a module of my model. They all communicate via WiFi with a Mosquitto broker that coordinates the lighting and the visitor interaction modules.

The test case is a moon base with about a dozen nodes, and later I’ll do the city with nearly a hundred processors.

And that’s just one project. I also wrote an ERP system for the parts I need for building, or tools for text processing, or a mediaWiki extension.

And yes, I do all this on Linux.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I’m currently designing a digital sythesizer running on an FPGA to add sound to one of my models. Just to show you that all kinds of programming can be done on Linux.

The short answer is: it depends on what you’re doing.

Most servers run on Linux, so anything related with web backends or high performance computing (rendering, complex algorithms) will likely be deployed on Linux in production, so the devs may choose to do the whole program lifecycle from there (even if the language/framework is OS agnostic and could be developed from anywhere).

Other kinds of programs like video games may need a windows for their entire lifecycle, and iOS apps need macOS.

There is likely no “need” to develop from Linux, and it’s not necessary better, but some people may choose it for the entire lifecycle anyway

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.