Free and Open Source Software

"open source" is not a product, it means that you get access to the source code

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html

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?

Android and Firefox. GIMP is also amazing... Krita is one I found recently

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.

Ubuntu, maybe around 2007-2008.

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.

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 guess ubuntu firefox(my sister installed them on my first laptop and they just worked) and vlc. Calling android open source is kinda a stretch.

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.

Not technically the first, but what got me into it was libre office. I was too broke too afford word so I was looking into alternatives.

tachiyomi

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.

It surely don't count but reddit

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.

Crostini (The Chromebook Linux solution)

Emacs.

No really, it was like 1989 and I had to learn Unix systems for classes, and this white haired Emacs advocate convinced me to try it.

I just really wish I could answer 'Obsidian' 😓

Suse in 1999.

DDWRT technically came first for me, and m0n0wall, but OpenSolaris is where I really started to use it.

Xournal++

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.

Linux and godot

Linux

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.

Fedora Linux, tbh

Vim and GCC.

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

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 don't remember exactly anymore, but I guess... Firefox? And then Ubuntu after I got "serious" about it.

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.

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"

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.

@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 😃

For me ist was FreeCAD. From there to Linux and down the Rabbithole

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.