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What was your gateway product to open source? (www.cnet.com)
submitted 3 years ago by 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

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[–] 7 points 3 years ago

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).

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