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.