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Comment by officeplant | Hacker News Reader

As a owner of many pine64 products I wish there was a clear path to learning how to contribute. My last time coding was C++ class over 16 years ago and I wish I had some sort of idea on how to get started with hobby programming in my spare time as an adult.

Edit// Especially since I've jumped on the ARM bandwagon and replaced my desktop with an M1 mac and my laptop with a Pinebook Pro.

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Create apps! This is the most needed. We created a tutorial for Kirigami here: https://develop.kde.org/docs/kirigami/. There are also a few tutorials for GTK/libhandy with e.g. https://tuxphones.com/tutorial-developing-responsive-linux-s...

Also join the developer channels on matrix: #plasmamobile:kde.org (not sure that the address for the GNOME one)

Cool! This is the kind of thing I've wondered about for a while. This looks like some handy info.

Is there an option to use a higher level language like Python and these QT libraries still? I don't have a ton of time to contribute, but this might be a way forward for me someday.

EDIT: Your 2nd link is literally what I was asking about, although it's using Gtk3. I'm not familiar with either in depth, so I'm not picky there. That's really useful. Thanks for this!

Heh. Contributing to open source is....interesting. Pine64 really seems to only do the hardware aspect, everything else is up to others.

I guess I would ask: how do you want to contribute? Is there a specific niche you want to help fix? That's how I got involved, I wanted MMS (and later visual voicemail) for my Pinephone.. Or perhaps there's a specific project you like that needs help, or theres a particular bug that annoys you in a FOSS project. Those may be the best ways to get involved to help.

Just pick something that bothers you or you think is missing and start working on it. I'd recommend something application, as opposed to system, level to get started. That way you can develop using something like Python and not worry about lots of other dependencies on whatever you're working on.

There generally isn't much in the way of formal organization in the open source world... just scratch an itch that you have. There are relatively few people working on things specific to Linux on mobile so even a modest contribution can have a big impact. For example, the developer of the Megapixels camera app, which is a vast improvement over what existed previously but still needs much work, just wanted a better camera app.

It certainly depends on what feature or what app you would like to work on. Mobian and Manjaro are both on GitLab, and the public is able to create an account. Issues there may be marked Help Wanted or similar.

In regard to motivation to continue programming, that can be the most difficult. Overall if you are proud of your work and find it useful yourself, you will probably continue the habit of contributing and supporting your code.

go smaller, if u use some open source software check it's repositories and community forums and find something that people don't like to do

documentation is definitely a candidate also automated tests

Mostly it is you just need to dig in and make false starts until you figure it out.

btw, being on arm makes Pinephone development easier, since you don't have to cross compile.

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