Free and Open Source Software

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What was your gateway product to open source? (www.cnet.com)

submitted 2 years ago by graphito@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

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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

(page 3) 18 comments

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[–] GenBlob@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] iByteABit@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

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

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 2 years ago

WWIV

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch 2 points 2 years ago

I think it was Okular. I was looking for a way of editing PDFs without ads, invasive software, or subscription based payments.

[–] TechieDamien@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

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.

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