My try at this. It's always interesting to learn what kind of people make these smolwab places, so I thought I might contribute a bit as well.
Soooo... I'm a student of computer sciences in Europe. I use *nix. I like minimalism. I like my terminal and get scared of complex graphical UI.
Yea, very unexpected, I know. I didn't say that my contribution will be anything great.
I came here on ^C to socialize a bit and I am failing at it miserably. You can catch me on IRC from time to time, so feel free to reach out if you feel like it.
I have some very specific and sometimes unusual opinions on mostly technical things that I might write about here sometimes once I feel about it.
OS : Linux Mint
After deep research, I have found out that I don't really care which *nix OS I use, as long as all the things I haven't touch just work. And Mint just works.
terminal : alacritty
I used to use Kitty, but since I switched from evilwm+tmux to niri, I became bothered by it's slow startup. I still miss my ligatures tho...
terminal font : FiraCode Nerd Font
terminal multiplexer : tmux
shell : fish
editor : neovim
With some plugins of course:
Here on ^C I have a more minimal version of this config without plugins that can be found here.
wayland compositor : niri
I'm not one to preach the glory of wayland as our lord and savior, but I do like exploring different approaches to userspace design, and niri cought my attention enough to make the switch.
It's a scrolling compositor, which is a lot like tiling, except all the parts where it's different. I like it so far, tho I'm not sure if it's better than just using multiple desktops, it's just placebo.
I'm not really a fan of the wayland approach of baking everything into the compositor. Like on X, I could switch a WM and keep all the xbindkeys and xinitrc and whatnot from the previous one, but now I feel like if I decide to switch, I'll have to rebuild everything from scratch. But hey, at least I'm less likely to be compositor-hopping and more likely to be productive (by which I mean procrastination)
web browser : brave
gemini browser : amfora
IRC client : weechat
I don't really use that much software to be honest.
FORTH
Very nice low-level language. I still don't know all the secrets, but I'm getting the hang of it. If you are looking for a FORTH implementation with C bindings that actually works (unlike Gforth), I have made ex:forth
Zig
Minimal. Pretty syntax. Nice namespaced imports. Nice exception handeling. Only casting between types, especially for syscalls, can be a bit painful.
Go
Minimal, functional, relatively popular. For most tings, it just works, no extra hassle or funny features. I really like the interface-based OOP Go provides.
D
Great for string/array manipulations. Does not force OOP. Nice alternative method-like function syntax.
Pascal
You might be surprised, you might disagree even, but I think that Pascal is actually very nice language. It has some similarities with C, as they both originate from the ALGOL family, but it has it's own way of doing things. It is vay more high-level that C, but it still lacks many more modern features, like FP for example. Due to this, it feels more minimal and streamlined compared to many modern languages, without sacrificing convenience, which I like.
ruby
Great for scripting. Love the builtin regex. Love .each syntax. Love chaining methods.
Scheme
I think that the LISP language family is very good choice for a high-level, but still compiled language. Scheme is way less intimidating and way easier to set up than Common Lisp. Contrary to popular believe, Scheme allows you do write procedural programs just fine. Its macros are a lot of fun. Named LETs are a nice way to handle recursion without poluting the namespace.
C
C might not be the most attractive language these days, it might be a bit dated in places and I might sometimes wish that it has some features that are common in more modern languages, but you can always bet on it being there and being able to do whatever you've set up to do. And for that, I like it.