Free and Open Source Software

It was Mozilla for me back in 2000. I gradually replaced all the proprietary apps I was using on Windows with FLOSS alternatives and then finally made the mover to Linux around 2010. The only closed stuff I use now is an iPhone and I despise it.

For me-

• Linux
• F-Droid

For me those products are:

• Linux
• Firefox
• Bitwarden
• Libreoffice

First foss product I remember using was VLC, but what made me start seeking out Foss was F-droid with how I got tired of constantly trying to find something without unnecessary permissions, ads, or IAP.

That was what made me understand the true value of foss, and not just because something isn't paid with the intent of profiting doesn't mean it is worse. It can sometimes be much better and more respecting of your privacy with how hungry for telemetry companies are these days.

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.

Probably Mozilla.

VLC but it wasn't love at first sight, but it opened a whole new world of FOSS to me

To this day I still don't know why the fuss about VLC, I prefer MPC-HC

Probably Linux. It took me a couple of attempts, but at a certain point I got more motivated to stick with it and research how to fix problems instead of quitting it. That gave me a lot of general Linux knowledge to where it's much comfier now.

Firefox for sure.

Funny enough it was Windows.
Year of our Lord 2015, Microsoft was pushing for Windows 10, I was using 7 and wanted to keep doing so. One of the last updates completely broke my system, so I said "fuck it", backed up my files and installed Ubuntu.
From that moment on I gradually abandoned proprietary software at the point that today I live almost completely on FOSS.

Apache Web Server

Blender 2.9.3 LTS

Win Server. For real, I want to build a server around 2005. Someone showed me Windows Server 2003 or 2000 (I forgor) and I was like: "no way I would ever work like this!" Went home and tried out Ubuntu for the first time and was amazed.

For me it was Python and C development on Linux. (So Anaconda.) I was pretty impressed by how much you can do with free software. Before I would have thought scientists would use expensive proprietary software for calculations. Later I learned that they sometimes still do, but many write their own code using work from others in the field who released open source software.

Crostini (The Chromebook Linux solution)

The very first FOSS software I used was red hat Linux. My dad brought home a copy of it and left it laying next to our copy of windows. Next time I had to install an OS I found it and tried it. It was terrible. Didn't do anything I wanted to do. Put windows in the computer.

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.

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.

Well I was going to say Foxit PDF Reader, but my memory failed me. It was just free. So probably Firefox, though I had no concept of FOSS at the time and kept giving up on it and going back to Chrome due to autofill being pretty seamless across the mobile/desktop apps. But I'm all in on team Firefox now and have really enjoyed finding new apps to self-host in particular. Currently trying (and failing) to stand up an instance of Cryptpad.

I just really wish I could answer 'Obsidian' 😓

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'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.

Linux. I signed up with my first proper ISP as a kid in the '90s. The service included a shell account on their Linux server accessible by telnet. I thought it was really cool and decided to see if I could run it on my own computer, and to my delight, I could.

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?

"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

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.