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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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[–] 5 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

Mint was my first distro, too. Some videos from ExplainingComputers and Switched To Linux (before he was a bigot) got me interested in the distro, and then my uncle gave me an old ThinkPad and a DVD of Linux Mint 19.2 "Tessa".

After that, I installed Linux on all of my computers. I switched to Debian, then Fedora, then distrohopped for a bit before landing on my current configuration:

  • Garnet: openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma
  • Amethyst: Arch Linux with Sway (possibly soon to be Void with Qtile)
  • Pearl: crunchbang++ 12 (32-bit) with Openbox
  • LapisLazuli: Fedora 38 with MATE
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  • [+] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)
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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Whoever said Linux was hard to use was either a Windows/macOS shill, a Gentoo noob, or said it back in the '90s or 2000s when Linux was mostly quite hard to use.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I just swapped to Linux, and it's harder to use than windows, sort of.

    I still can't get one headphone jack to work on my case and my wifi printer/scanner can't be controlled on the printer anymore. Troubleshooting has two modes, a step by step instructions set that either works or doesn't, or highly technical stuff that is above my expertise.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Fair enough. I guess the hardware support can make it tricky.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    I think it's both an issue if hardware support and being the little guy.

    If Linux wants to be bigger it needs to change it's selling point. People have been conditioned to think of free software as bloated ad-fests by their phones. My wife was asking how I liked Linux and I could only describe apps as the early Android app store where everything was free and generally great.

    Calling out Windows for privacy issues doesn't have too much sway. Mostly because the damage is done, people have posted on Facebook and agreed to every tracker, what's one more? Calling out Windows for being slower, showing you ads all the time and taking away features might have more traction.

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