With this article, I will try to convey my process of participating in the Teknofest Pardus 21 competition, my experiences and the experiences I gained in the competition.
Although I can't remember exactly when I first encountered Linux and Pardus, my interest arose about 2 years ago. I tried many distributions, Pardus was one of them, because my current laptop computer does not support Linux and I have some problems. However, when I couldn't solve these problems, I went back to the operating system I used before.
When I saw the Pardus competition on Teknofestin site, I immediately got interested and decided to participate. Although I installed another distribution at first, I later installed the GNOME version of Pardus on my computer.
For the competition, I listed the deficiencies that I saw in the applications of Pardus and tried to correct them one by one. For example, the power profile did not change when the battery level decreased in Pardus Power Manager, this feature is available in the power manager applications of other operating systems. I added this feature and opened a pull-request from Github and a suggestion request from demand.pardus.org.tr.
Another suggestion I requested was for Pardus Pen, Pardus Pen had the feature of taking a picture of the screen, but this might not be enough. When you take a photo after writing, it can not always be understood and the order of the written things can be important, so I added the feature to record the screen.
The most important experience I gained during the competition was the process of contributing to an open source project, and reading the code of another project is a very good start if you want to contribute to open source projects. Another important thing I learned: If you decide to contribute to most open source projects like Pardus or to add a feature you always wanted, it is generally not written how each function works or why some method choices are made. You can figure these out by reading the code, researching it, or looking at git history.
After the request process was over, I waited for the results of the competition and when I finally learned that I was a finalist, I was very happy and excited. When Teknofest was about to start, I went to Istanbul with my consultant, and I visited the Teknofest until the day of the award ceremony. I met the first and third winners of the competition, participated in the events at the pardus stand of teknofest and played the competition made to teach pardus to the visitors at teknofest, it was quite fun. If you are interested in Pardus or Linux, I recommend you to participate in this competition.
