On the other hand I avoided going into the field until I hit 30 because I didn’t want to spend all day on a computer and then have it effect my willingness to use a PC at home.
Of course you don’t have to be a programmer to be stuck in front of a PC all day so I figured I might as well do something I’m good at. The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.
That said I still find I come home unmotivated for hobby dev, if I’m going to work on my hobby projects I need to get out of bed 60-90 minutes earlier and do that while I’m fresh.
I’m only going to mention desktop software, there’s too many tools and layers involved in spinning up a server.
Daily use (most used first):
- Firefox
- Notepad++
- VS Code
- Git
- 7-zip (love the tool but hate the format, storage and bandwidth is cheap now, let’s just use zip please)
- VLC
- Python
It’s a pretty boring list: a webbrowser, two text editors, and version control for text files
Stuff I wish I had more time to use:
- Godot
- Blender
- Audacity
- Krita
Special mention:
- QGIS (and the whole OSGeo ecosystem)
- qBittorrent
- RetroArch (and all the FOSS emulators it promotes)
- OpenTTD
I’m surprised to see (photo)GIMP and Inkscape mentioned but not Krita. I would also rank OpenTTD up there with OpenRCT2.