Aryan Karamtoth

I'm Aryan Karamtoth alias SpaciousCoder78. I hail from India. I've been using computers since the age of 3 but back during my days Windows XP was the go-to one and I was unaware of Linux. One day, I saw one of the older laptops at home running some weird OS that didn't look like Windows. Upon enquiring a little, I found out that it was Linux Mint and I immediately wanted to have it. One of my grandfather's friends got Ubuntu installed instead and that's my first interaction with Linux.

over the years, I used Linux whenever I felt bored. In 2020, I picked up programming and wrote small scale projects in Python. After graduating out of school, I had plenty of time to go deeper into programming. I came to know about contributing to Linux Distros during UbuCon Asia 2024, where I started contributing translations to other Linux Distros.

It wasn't until 2025 I came across Debian. One day at work, I was quite irritated by the constant need to copy paste errors into my search engine as we were dealing with a very old code base and this is when I got the idea to write quickoverflow, a small software tool I wrote at work to instantly open stackoverflow with the error I encountered rather than copy pasting it. I wanted to distribute this to linux distros and I did it with Arch Linux first by packaging it to AUR but I also wanted to have it on Debian based distros and thats when I approached #debian-mentors.

I never got around to packaging quickoverflow but I ended up installing Debian for debian packaging and I never looked at another distro since then as Debian is the only distro that never gave me a single problem.

In Debian most of my work was focused on packaging python libraries. I worked with various Debian Developers on fixing some RC bugs as well as contributing to some of their personal projects as well as convincing an upstream project to change their non-free license to a free one as it violated DFSG. I also worked on some rust packages, mostly tree-sitter and some GNOME GTK apps.

I'm most active in the following teams as of now: Debian Python Team, Debian Med Team, Debian Rust Team, Debian GNOME Team.

I also help newcomers on the Mentors channel and also on the mailing lists in my capacity. I'm also a wiki maintainer and I helped maintain the wiki for MiniDebConf Navi Mumbai 2025. I was one of the organisers of this event, I worked on making the posters and the logo design for MiniDebConf Navi Mumbai 2025.

Debian not only taught me to be a better software developer but also helped me make a good amount of friends in the past 6 months.

Hence by applying for the NM process, I would like to increase my involvement in the Debian Project.