We recently interviewed Radka Janek on how she uses Fedora. This is part of a series on the Fedora Magazine. The series profiles Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done. Contact us on the feedback form to express your interest in becoming a interviewee.

Who is Radka Janek?

Radka Janek is a former game programmer and community manager. She actively contributes to gaming and open source communities. Radka describes herself as: “Currently wearing her Red Hat, inspiring the desolate whitespace of Linux world with the delicate C# letters of simplified artificial intelligence. Trails of her C#, C++ and Python keystrokes can be found in the World of Tanks and several of the Angry Birds games. Her Fedora feels the delicate .NET presence as well.”

Radka wanted to be an astronaut and a princess, or an astronaut princess. She was inspired by a Slovak astronaut named Ivan Bella. Bella went to the Russian Mir station when Janek was nine years old. This fascination with space continues with Janek’s favorite movies, Stargate and Star Trek.

Janek works a lot. She keeps busy working for Red Hat on the .NET team and contributing to Fedora and personal projects. Her free time is now dedicated to going out with friends and colleagues. “I really like tea, we often go to tearooms.” Radka used to practice Iaido. Iaido is a Japanese martial art that emphasizes being aware and capable of quickly drawing the sword and responding to a sudden attack.

Fedora community

Janek’s involvement with the Fedora community started when she got an offer from Red Hat to work on .NET enablement. After learning more about the Fedora community, Radka started the .NET SIG. She hopes to make Fedora, and Linux in general, C# friendly. “It is not all closed Microsoft anymore, it’s time to realize that!” Janek is also a member of the CommOps and Diversity teams.

Radka is truly impressed with how inclusive and encouraging the Fedora Project is. She credits Justin W. Flory with influencing her decision to created the .Net SIG. “Justin W. Flory helped me when I first joined CommOps and encouraged me to start the whole .NET thing.”

Janek considers herself a bit of a revolutionary. As a Red Hatter she is enabling .NET in Linux despite the historical association with closed source software and Microsoft. “It is a new open source project, it is not the old .NET Framework, and people should realize that.” She is hopeful that the world of open source software can grow based on attracting .NET developers from the Microsoft world. “I would like to believe that Fedora has the potential of becoming welcoming for the .NET developers.” Radka’s concern about unresolved conflicts between contributors could be a stumbling block for such efforts which is why she joined the Diversity team.

What hardware?

Radka makes use of a Red Hat-issued Lenovo T460p with Fedora 25. She also has a Windows machine at home. “I do have one Windows machine (rather powerful), overclocked and watercooled which is a historic piece reminding me of my past life of a game developer (and player). I no longer use it much, not more than once a month.” Janek also has a Core i7 water cooled server used for network storage. The home computer list is completed with a Raspberry Pi 3 which was used to run a bot that has been moved to a VPS. She makes use of a Logitech MX Anywhere mouse, K810 keyboard, Sennheiser microphone and Creative Soundblaster soundcard.

What software?

She usually upgrades her OS about a month or two after release. Her network storage server is running unRAID Linux with SSD Cache. Radka considers herself a fairly standard user when it comes to work software. “As far as my Fedora (notebook) goes, I’m not using anything special for my work. Browser, git, weechat… the usual suspects.” When it comes to C# she makes use of JetBrains Rider for an IDE. “I really can’t stand Visual Studio or VS Code.” Once JetBrains is released she hopes to never again have to use Visual Studio.