I want to talk about our gateway products to open source. You know, that one product or software that made us go, "Whoa, this is amazing!" and got us hooked on the world of open source.
What made you to jump ships? Was it the "free" side of things like qBittorrent? Did you even know that some of your programs are open source before you got into the topic?
For me those products were:
Android
Firefox
VLC
Calibre
Am thinking to order some merch and I wanna make it more accessible to people unfamilliar with open source culture. Now, am looking for fairly normalized but still underrepresented product -- maybe it could serve as a conversation starter and push some people to open source
Like other people have said, I've used open-source software for decades without thinking about it, but what really made me think about it as a concept was when I got into Skyrim modding, and I saw the exorbitant subscription fees of Photoshop and then learned through that community about GIMP. Then, I started learning more about things like privacy and more tangible effects of corporate greed, and gradually switched to more alternatives.
However, I personally never tried a FOSS OS until the last couple months when someone on Lemmy talked me into trying Linux. I always thought it was only for people with high levels of technical skills, but it turns out there are distros that are extremely accessible to users like myself.
Linux. I think I started playing with it around 2001. I was a computer nerd on high school and I wanted to be a hacker. I would be lying if I said that The Matrix wasn't a big factor. To this day I use black console with green text.
For me it was first VLC without really knowing what FOSS was, then KeePass while getting to know a bit about it, and finally Thunderbird.
What did it for me was just how good and bullshit-free they were, especially in comparison to paid competitors. They really are the best products in their field, proving the quality often behind FOSS software.
Linux Mint. I was trying to edit a video and was struggling to get anything to work properly in windows. I was frustrated and looking for solutions on YouTube when I came across Mental Outlaws channel somehow. The rest is history.
Firefox and VLC on Windows for years, which just worked. Later XBMC/Kodi and fileserver which where s... on windows but, again, just worked on Linux. When Windows later on kept nagging for something I migrated to 100% Open Source and have been a happy camper ever since!
Getting a free Ubuntu live CD back in 2007 when I was a teenager. We had the shittiest internet, I think it was like 512kbps ADSL, so it was really hard to download software. No one I knew at the time was into linux or open source, so I learnt about it all from that Ubuntu CD and the smaller programs I downloaded with it once setting it up. I learnt GRUB and dual-booted it on the laptop I had for school.
GIMP and Mozilla Browser were a couple of my early ones as a Windows user, but I probably saw those as worse, or at least less polished, versions of other software. Gaim (later Pidgin) was the one that first made an impression on me.
AIM was important software — it basically was social media to me at the time — and I'd stumbled into using third-party add-ons (for example, DeadAIM) for the official AIM client to add extra features and block the in-app ad banner. But it was always a cat-and-mouse game where AOL would try to block add-ons and the developers would have to work around that.
Gaim was refreshingly immune to all that stuff... it simply didn't support ads, and all its advanced features were built-in. That it supported other messaging protocols was a nice surprise too, and to this day has soured me on siloed, proprietary messaging apps. The GTK UI also looked and felt a little exotic on Windows XP.
When I finally moved to Ubuntu, having apps like Gaim, Firefox and GIMP ready to go made things pretty comfy.
There really wasn't a specific gateway product, and I'm still using closed and open source solutions back to back.
User experience and user interface are more important to me than open source. The only consideration I have beyond that would be privacy & security.
For instance I've always used Firefox and rejected Chrome due to data privacy concerns, and would use a portable chromium installation if a website was inaccessible with FF. On the other hand side MS Office and Photoshop are vastly superior to libre office and gimp.
When it comes to applications I use once in a blue moon for a few minutes at a time, I'll usually go for FOSS, but moreso because it's free and the UI can be as ugly as it wants if I don't have to stare at it for hours on end.
And well, I absolutely despise Apple as a company, so using Android was pretty much without alternatives, after BlackBerry discontinued their OS.
Apache. This was over 20 years ago. The web server that everyone seemed to be using was free to download and open source. That made a big impact on how I viewed free software, and encouraged me to use more of it.
Mhm my first FOSS was probably The Gimp two or so decades ago. Previous to that I used Corel Draw and Paint Shop Pro. Suse Linux on a CD followed soon after as a test, but it didn't hold me for long.
For me it was a combination of factors: Windows has been going down the shitter for at least 10 years now, FOSS software has been getting better and better, and I've learned to use more FOSS tools as I grew tired of dealing with Windows.
If I had to point at one project that made me go "Wow, this is amazing", I'd say ffmpeg. Even in my Windows days, I've always enjoyed digital preservation, when I discovered ffmpeg around 2015 it was an eye opener, so many features, so many options, I've been using it on a daily basis ever since.
I can't even remember... It was probably when I first heard about Linux in the early/mid 90's. I got Slackware in 93 or 94 and fascinated by the idea in general.
Hell, if might even have started before that when I was first learning to read and read through our encyclopedia collection like bedtime stories (I was obsessed with reading anything in print once I learned how). I know that's how I learned about the internet.
Slackware. Just before I started college I was sent the list of baseline requirements for comp.sci classes. Windows 95 or Windows NT, Visual C++, and a serial connection. I didn't have the money for '95 or NT; I was still using an 80486 with four (just before moving on campus, I traded up to eight) megs of RAM and wasn't in a position to get a new box (though I did drop pretty much my entire discretionary budget for the next two years into a one gig hard drive, which got me all the way through undergrad). However, there was a BBS in my NPA called Monolith, which was basically a Slackware Linux box with two dialup lines running homebrew BBS software. The sysop let me download the boot, root, A, D, and N disk sets (one floppy at a time - it took weeks) and helped me set up a basic Slackware machine. Once I got up to school I was able to set up a serial connection (and later, talk the building into lighting up my floor's ethernet lines). The rest, as they say, is history.
I got pulled in after hearing the term "copyleft". Red hat 6 was out (version numbering scheme has changed since then). I was a teen and into skateboarding and punk so I was attracted to this legal document that used the system against the system. I became a Linux evangelist to fight back against Steve Ballmer and big bad Microsoft. Felt good to have a glimmer of hope.
The first FOSS product I ever used would have been either Firefox or OpenOffice.org, back in ~2010. I also used to like VLC.
The product that got me to go almost exclusively FOSS, however, was Linux Mint. I installed it on an old ThinkPad that my uncle had given me in 2019, and I was immediately impressed that this twelve-year-old notebook with (at the time) 4GB of RAM and an Intel Centrino processor could now easily outperform my brand new HP (which ran Windows).
It was only about a year later when I installed Mint on my HP, followed by my old Acer (which had been on a shelf for the last two years), and most recently my 2007 MacBook (which I keep around because it's the only thing that can operate my scanner).
Not only was it better than IE6, it was also free! Not sure how aware I was of the libre aspect initially, but around the same time I also dabled in (Mandrake? Mandriva?) Linux, which exposed me to GNU, GPL, and the idea of copyleft.
Nothing, I didn't think much of it or cared if something was open source or not. It's when I started to become privacy conscious I started to care, though one program in my childhood that I actually thought was cool but not necessarily because open source was 7-zip - it's free winrar that worked better for me.
I mean, maybe I'm too old, but I don't know of anybody in real life that actively thinks there is a "world of open source". People mostly just use software. Software is either good or bad. It's either monetized or it isn't.
Maybe I come from a time where a piece of software attempting to charge a fee was seen as a cute quirk, or the extra charge if you wanted a printed manual, but yeah, this doesn't make a ton of sense to me.
For me, Blender was probably my very first introduction into FOSS. I was using it because it was free, but I also liked the concept behind having a useful software the people used everyday to make cool projects like movies and animated shows. I did a project on it in. What really got me down the rabbithole was Debian. I had come across it in computer class, and I really liked the interface. i did more research and came to love Debian for being a stable distro run by the community. From thereit's history.
Not my first libre product, but definitely the one that got me into searching for libre alternatives - OpenOffice. Despite not being great at the time (or ever), i was amazed by how complicated microsoft turned 365Office into. I suddenly had to buy subscriptions to all of the office products for outrages prices just so that i can have a simple words editors? Screw that, i googled for "open source office software" and never came back to m$Office.
My computer suddenly died when I was an unemployed student, about 12 years ago. I had no money for a new one or repairs, etc. It was pretty devastating.
Then I somehow discovered my city's local Freegeek, (the one in Vancouver BC) - I was able to buy an refurbished Ubuntu tower for $35. They showed me how to use it, invited me back if I needed help, and were generally super kind and helpful.
It was a very nice introduction to the world of open source. I had no clue such a thing as free software and OS even existed before then. Ive been using linux ever since, as much as possible.
I can't say I actually recall. My dad was a software developer and into open source software so I was around a lot of that growing up. Firefox was my first web browser, OpenOffice writer was my first document processor. My dad installed some open source games on an Ubuntu machine for me to play. It was a little bit of everything.
I don't remember how I heard about it but you used to be able to order free Ubuntu disks. I got them to mail me one and I replaced Windows with it and never looked back.
I came across Linux sometime in the late 90's. It was free (as in pricetag, which is all I cared about at the time) and different so I was curious. The PC I was using wasn't mine so repartitioning wasn't an option but I found some ready to go boot from dos linux distro and gave it a go. And I loved it! And still do.
I started with 4.3BSD on a VAX-11/750 in the mid 80s. At the time, you had to pay for a Unix license from AT&T, send a copy of the paperwork to UC Berkeley as proof, then they'd mail you a 9-track tape. (I think that was the process? I was just a lowly user on the system.)
Not exactly what we'd call "Free software", but after all that you did end up with the full source code.
Windows. More specially a netbook with vista, that ran so incredibly slow ot of the box that it pushed me to install linux.
Technically i used Firefox before that, but that was when Firefox was the de facto standard in Germany, so i didn't care about FOSS.
I started first in 2012-ish with Linux. That’s when I first heard of it, and decided to spin an VM with Ubuntu 12.04. Though initially I didn’t use it in real hardware for sometime, eventually I did install Fedora and been pretty happy ever since. Nowadays mostly use openSUSE and Arch.
This question has really got me thinking about the old days! I thought that it was looking into Debian Linux when trying to repurpose some old IBM PS/2 machines at work, because there were rumors of patchsets for the Linux kernel to support the MicroChannel Architecture bus and ESDI drives. But now I remember that it was actually GeekGadgets, a Unix environment for Amiga based around the ixemul.library. That's where I first read the GPL, and admired its legal Jiu-Jitsu of using copyright laws to ensure freedom.
I've never been a Windows user on my own machines as a result. I just went from Amiga, to FreeBSD, to Ubuntu.
Funny enough it was Windows.
Year of our Lord 2015, Microsoft was pushing for Windows 10, I was using 7 and wanted to keep doing so. One of the last updates completely broke my system, so I said "fuck it", backed up my files and installed Ubuntu.
From that moment on I gradually abandoned proprietary software at the point that today I live almost completely on FOSS.
It was Mozilla for me back in 2000. I gradually replaced all the proprietary apps I was using on Windows with FLOSS alternatives and then finally made the mover to Linux around 2010. The only closed stuff I use now is an iPhone and I despise it.
First foss product I remember using was VLC, but what made me start seeking out Foss was F-droid with how I got tired of constantly trying to find something without unnecessary permissions, ads, or IAP.
That was what made me understand the true value of foss, and not just because something isn't paid with the intent of profiting doesn't mean it is worse. It can sometimes be much better and more respecting of your privacy with how hungry for telemetry companies are these days.
Postfix! I worked at an E-commerce company that sent newsletters(spam) through shitty Windows SMTP servers. Looking for speed and some other neat things (DKIM and modify headers) I setup postfix on Debian and I guess this system is still running. Quickly after that I explored NGINX as a reverse proxy for yet again shitty Windows IIS webservers. This was my entry to open source and Linux in general.
Probably Linux. It took me a couple of attempts, but at a certain point I got more motivated to stick with it and research how to fix problems instead of quitting it. That gave me a lot of general Linux knowledge to where it's much comfier now.
For me it was Python and C development on Linux. (So Anaconda.) I was pretty impressed by how much you can do with free software. Before I would have thought scientists would use expensive proprietary software for calculations. Later I learned that they sometimes still do, but many write their own code using work from others in the field who released open source software.
Android. I grew up with old phones where you chased the new trend but you always lost something or you where limited to what manufacturer’s limited idea. This one has good ring tones. this has amazing camera. This got real games. This one has music buttons. This one has apps(not really apps but back then impressive for a phone)
Updates did not exist what you got in box was what you got.
suddenly this device comes out where you could do anything.
I could install real Linux, community supported software and made it better. This was my gateway because why should I accept to pay money when the moment I given you money you moved on and forced me to buy next stuff but forgot the great things you done?
Well I was going to say Foxit PDF Reader, but my memory failed me. It was just free.
So probably Firefox, though I had no concept of FOSS at the time and kept giving up on it and going back to Chrome due to autofill being pretty seamless across the mobile/desktop apps. But I'm all in on team Firefox now and have really enjoyed finding new apps to self-host in particular. Currently trying (and failing) to stand up an instance of Cryptpad.
I had been using some form of UNIX and some early GNU utilities for a few years by time Linux came out and had heard some rumblings about 386BSD (development started in 1989) via newsgroups, but it remained out of reach for me.
I heard about Linux (SLS Linux) being available late summer of 1992 and started saving for a 386, which I build later that year.
In the end, due to download limitations I started with HJ Lu's boot/root disks for Linux (floppy disk images), starting with kernel version 0.12 and happily living in the terminal.
Virtual terminals were the killer app that kept me solely on Linux for a long while. Being able to download on one terminal and code in a 2nd (I programmed a MUD for free dial-up Internet access for a local system) was amazing and far better than Windows 3.x during this time frame.
I'm so old, when I started, software was either part of the operating system, or we had to get it for free, as source to compile it locally. Yes, there were commercial software packages for some applications, but most of the everyday stuff (editor, file browser, file transfer programs, multi-user online games and their clients) was open source. And many of us contributed, me included. I wrote Gobelin, an NNTP news reader/filter/aggregator, and Connector, a frontend for multi-user online games.
@graphito Red hat Linux back in 99. Ran X11 Gnome with Metacity, bash and emacs. Still using Linux today. But Im on Arch with zsh, kde/plasma Wayland and NeoVim. Probably the only thing that I still use now from '99 is less 😃
Signed up for Ubuntu free CD. Got 10.04 LTS. Was such an improvement from vista on a core 2 duo and 3gb ddr2. Only moved complete to linux in 2019 after years of tinkering with couple RPis and getting the hang of using linux.
Win Server. For real, I want to build a server around 2005. Someone showed me Windows Server 2003 or 2000 (I forgor) and I was like: "no way I would ever work like this!" Went home and tried out Ubuntu for the first time and was amazed.
Linux. I signed up with my first proper ISP as a kid in the '90s. The service included a shell account on their Linux server accessible by telnet. I thought it was really cool and decided to see if I could run it on my own computer, and to my delight, I could.
Emacs. That was the first editor I touched on my university's Fedora. And then I read that it had forks, was customizable with Lisp. I then read more about the Unix community and so on. That was interesting.
Likely not the best for merch: my first FOSS soft was DJGPP, in the DOS era. Tried to use BSD before that, but it was like 200 floppies, and never got it to work.
The thing that fully sold me though, was installing some drivers on RedHat 5.1, and seeing how "they recompile themselves! 🤯"... so dunno, was it rpm? make? gcc? kbuild?... hard to tell now.
Next thing was getting a second PC, installing a bare bones system, going into bash, ls /bin, and going man [everything].
I might still have some "man bash" stickers somewhere, used to have them on a few laptops over the years.
Slackware V3.1 in 1996. I bought a thick reference book that came with the installation floppies. Installed to an IBM Aptiva, forget the model and processor.
I've been exclusively on open source since at least 22 years now, but the one thing I always use to lure people to Linux is the bling, then they stay for the awesomeness.
KDE used to have awesome bling which I regularly used for that but lately they've been taking more and more of it away. Now event the 3D desktop is gone and it's mostly just a normal desktop, not really something to lure people with, unfortunately
Ubuntu 9.04. Jaunty Jackelope in 2009. Started by dual booting my Windows laptop. XP mainstream support ended that year, and I didn't want to upgrade to Vista, nor could my laptop handle 7.
Stumbled upon Novell Suse Linux in the software section of Best Buy. That sent me down the rabbit hole. I actually got caught up in the world BSD specifically DesktopBSD. I was amazed by all the “free” software options.
I was starting college and got my first notebook. Up to that point we had only a desktop PC for all the family and this was the first time I could actually try things out without messing with my brothers’ stuff, so I eagerly jumped to try new things and format my notebook every 2 months after completely screwing something up.
The thing that hooked me up was the breath of fresh air in terms of customisation that a Linux distro offered compared to Windows. Funnily enough the mac OS style was my favourite so I eventually ended up buying a mac, but I always maintained a distro on bootcamp.
For me it was probably Gimp and then Linux (specifically mandrake). I'm shocked I havnt seen mention of VLC yet though, as it's another one that gets use every day for me.
First used Linux mint in 2007, was fascinated and frustrated at the same time with why things didnt work like on my windows PC, I now have a dedicated Linux Laptop (linux mint)
My buddy’s mom took his pc as punishment for some nonsense. We cobbled together some parts so he could secretly play an online flash game with me. His frames were seconds behind mine. But we installed Ubuntu on it since we couldn’t afford windows in high school. So I learned about Linux.
Wow. I honestly can’t tell. I think it was ChromOS? Indirectly of course.
Years and years ago, I was really frustrated with windows on my tiny laptop, and I wanted something different. And I loved ChromeOS back then, but I couldn’t afford a Chromebook, and I was looking for something that had a similar interface.
So I looked online, and people were recommending Linux, but I already knew of Linux, as I had a terrible experience with Ubuntu a while before (it was using Unity, to give you a timeframe). But eventually, I found something, it was a post on Reddit by someone looking for something like me, something that would look like what chromous looked like at the time, that was as simple, and one of the best suggestion there was a distribution by the name of “SolusOS”, Specifically, the Budgie variant.
So, I installed it on my little laptop. I fell in love with it, the whole thing, the desktop, the project, Linux as a whole, And then they just kind of snowballed from there. Solus was my go to distro for years.
Now I’m stuck on a MacBook Air, on Mac OS, for many reasons, and I want something new. But even before that, when I had to give up on that laptop and Solus for various reasons, I used many others distros. And I really loved some. But I still miss my tiny laptop and Solus on it…
I miss this simple joy of just using my machine and it just working. I feel like, every piece of tech that is in my life, right now, to try and simplify it, to help me do things, is only making my life worse, and bothering me with stupid stuff at every turn…
Or maybe it’s because I just grew up, I became an adult, lots of things happened in my life, and I just miss how simpler things used to feel back then, maybe I just reflect that in my technology. I don’t know. But I miss it… a lot.
Red Hat 6 on the front of a magazine in 2000 which was an interesting curiosity, and then a Fedora Core 2 live disc my university lecturer was handing out in 2004.
I had used plenty of open source products in the past, but the first one I truly learned the "why it's important" is home assistant. Seeing the strong community and reading more about open source projects and why it's to everyone's benefit.
We can make a far superior, safer, and community first product.
It started with Fedora for me, then Firefox but OpenOffice was the first that made me think "hey, that's good for everyone, not just geeks like me, I gotta show it to my friends and clients"
For me, the gateway was via palm pilot careware. My dad had a PDA when I was a kid, and he let me learn how to program it. Then I learned that there were websites to download software for it, and some of that software was "careware", ie pay only if you're able. Something clicked in my head that I could both write and access software without cost being a barrier, and that got me reading about FLOSS philosophy as I entered high school and suddenly I was dual booting ubuntu on the intel iBook I had saved up for and then it was too late for me: FLOSS had me.
Teeworlds. When I was a kid I searched up "free online multiplayer games on pc" and it actually led me to this Wikipedia article full of open source games. I tried out teeworlds and I was hooked on it and it led me to playing other open source games like cube 2 and open arena. In my head, the term open source meant "free stuff". Searching for open source stuff led me to discovering Linux and trying it though the Wubi installer and eventually moving to it a few years later.
I've used a few open source programs before studying CS without knowing what FOSS was, but the time when I really got into it and started diving deeper is probably after installing Arch Linux
OpenFOAM. I needed powerful software to do CFD that was free, as in free beer, and found OpenFOAM. To run it on windows, the installation instructions first step was install linux on a vm then follow the linux installation instructions. I did that and started using the vm for other stuff until I found myself using the vm for most tasks, but kept using windows for gaming. To learn more, I got myself a pinebook, which replaced most of the usage of my vm. When windows decided to self destruct, I had learnt enough to install and configure arch with minimal help. Now, nothing can persuade me to go back.