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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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[–] 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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