Free and Open Source Software

Although I technically used OSS before (ie Firefox), Linux (Ubuntu) is what made me actually start caring about it.

For me it was a combination of factors: Windows has been going down the shitter for at least 10 years now, FOSS software has been getting better and better, and I've learned to use more FOSS tools as I grew tired of dealing with Windows.

If I had to point at one project that made me go "Wow, this is amazing", I'd say ffmpeg. Even in my Windows days, I've always enjoyed digital preservation, when I discovered ffmpeg around 2015 it was an eye opener, so many features, so many options, I've been using it on a daily basis ever since.

Using linux as an alternative to windows and really enjoying it.

Firefox 1.0

Not only was it better than IE6, it was also free! Not sure how aware I was of the libre aspect initially, but around the same time I also dabled in (Mandrake? Mandriva?) Linux, which exposed me to GNU, GPL, and the idea of copyleft.

And then there was VLC.

For me it was first VLC without really knowing what FOSS was, then KeePass while getting to know a bit about it, and finally Thunderbird. What did it for me was just how good and bullshit-free they were, especially in comparison to paid competitors. They really are the best products in their field, proving the quality often behind FOSS software.

Simply because I haven't seen it mentioned yet: 7-zip
But realistically VLC and Firefox

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.

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.

I just really wish I could answer 'Obsidian' 😓

There really wasn't a specific gateway product, and I'm still using closed and open source solutions back to back.

User experience and user interface are more important to me than open source. The only consideration I have beyond that would be privacy & security.

For instance I've always used Firefox and rejected Chrome due to data privacy concerns, and would use a portable chromium installation if a website was inaccessible with FF. On the other hand side MS Office and Photoshop are vastly superior to libre office and gimp.

When it comes to applications I use once in a blue moon for a few minutes at a time, I'll usually go for FOSS, but moreso because it's free and the UI can be as ugly as it wants if I don't have to stare at it for hours on end.

And well, I absolutely despise Apple as a company, so using Android was pretty much without alternatives, after BlackBerry discontinued their OS.

Linux. I think I started playing with it around 2001. I was a computer nerd on high school and I wanted to be a hacker. I would be lying if I said that The Matrix wasn't a big factor. To this day I use black console with green text.

My roommate installed Ubuntu on my laptop when I was in college. That was the start. Now it looks like this: https://xkcd.com/456/

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

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.

Firefox and VLC on Windows for years, which just worked. Later XBMC/Kodi and fileserver which where s... on windows but, again, just worked on Linux. When Windows later on kept nagging for something I migrated to 100% Open Source and have been a happy camper ever since!

My buddy’s mom took his pc as punishment for some nonsense. We cobbled together some parts so he could secretly play an online flash game with me. His frames were seconds behind mine. But we installed Ubuntu on it since we couldn’t afford windows in high school. So I learned about Linux.

This question has really got me thinking about the old days! I thought that it was looking into Debian Linux when trying to repurpose some old IBM PS/2 machines at work, because there were rumors of patchsets for the Linux kernel to support the MicroChannel Architecture bus and ESDI drives. But now I remember that it was actually GeekGadgets, a Unix environment for Amiga based around the ixemul.library. That's where I first read the GPL, and admired its legal Jiu-Jitsu of using copyright laws to ensure freedom.

I've never been a Windows user on my own machines as a result. I just went from Amiga, to FreeBSD, to Ubuntu.

Slackware. Just before I started college I was sent the list of baseline requirements for comp.sci classes. Windows 95 or Windows NT, Visual C++, and a serial connection. I didn't have the money for '95 or NT; I was still using an 80486 with four (just before moving on campus, I traded up to eight) megs of RAM and wasn't in a position to get a new box (though I did drop pretty much my entire discretionary budget for the next two years into a one gig hard drive, which got me all the way through undergrad). However, there was a BBS in my NPA called Monolith, which was basically a Slackware Linux box with two dialup lines running homebrew BBS software. The sysop let me download the boot, root, A, D, and N disk sets (one floppy at a time - it took weeks) and helped me set up a basic Slackware machine. Once I got up to school I was able to set up a serial connection (and later, talk the building into lighting up my floor's ethernet lines). The rest, as they say, is history.

I don't remember how I heard about it but you used to be able to order free Ubuntu disks. I got them to mail me one and I replaced Windows with it and never looked back.

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.

Blender 2.9.3 LTS

Getting a free Ubuntu live CD back in 2007 when I was a teenager. We had the shittiest internet, I think it was like 512kbps ADSL, so it was really hard to download software. No one I knew at the time was into linux or open source, so I learnt about it all from that Ubuntu CD and the smaller programs I downloaded with it once setting it up. I learnt GRUB and dual-booted it on the laptop I had for school.

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.

Real long time ago. It was either Blender in its early days, or maybe Nethack as a child.

Gaim.

GIMP and Mozilla Browser were a couple of my early ones as a Windows user, but I probably saw those as worse, or at least less polished, versions of other software. Gaim (later Pidgin) was the one that first made an impression on me.

AIM was important software — it basically was social media to me at the time — and I'd stumbled into using third-party add-ons (for example, DeadAIM) for the official AIM client to add extra features and block the in-app ad banner. But it was always a cat-and-mouse game where AOL would try to block add-ons and the developers would have to work around that.

Gaim was refreshingly immune to all that stuff... it simply didn't support ads, and all its advanced features were built-in. That it supported other messaging protocols was a nice surprise too, and to this day has soured me on siloed, proprietary messaging apps. The GTK UI also looked and felt a little exotic on Windows XP.

When I finally moved to Ubuntu, having apps like Gaim, Firefox and GIMP ready to go made things pretty comfy.

Apache Web Server

I still remember how Firefox's tabbed browsing blew my mind.

• OpenOffice
• Firefox
• Thunderbird

Nothing, I didn't think much of it or cared if something was open source or not. It's when I started to become privacy conscious I started to care, though one program in my childhood that I actually thought was cool but not necessarily because open source was 7-zip - it's free winrar that worked better for me.