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What was your gateway product to open source?

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

162 comments

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • I'm very much the same. It mostly depends on "does the open source program do what I need/want?" If not, I'm okay with using a closed source version of it.

      My current number one example here would be spreadsheet calculators. Years ago (and for my personal use) I only used LibreOffice/OpenOffice because it did/does all I need. But at work I need to use MS Excel not only because it's what the company has but also because the tables function and everything that relates to it (like data slicers, automatic expansion of formulas and formats, etc.) is really awesome and either super complex to replicate or straight up impossible in LibreOffice. And a couple months ago I decided to optimize the Excel sheets at work by incorporating some VBA macros. It's super useful and I couldn't find an open source alternative to it that would not run into problems on existing VBA-Excel sheets very, very quickly.

      On the other hand I have photo editing / art programs. For those, I happily hopped from one FOSS to another (GIMP to Krita and I think I had a third one at some point as well) because I actually only need the "basic" and "on the surface" tools of such programs. And so I never even began feeling a pressure to use a closed source program.

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

  • 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 can't even remember... It was probably when I first heard about Linux in the early/mid 90's. I got Slackware in 93 or 94 and fascinated by the idea in general.

    Hell, if might even have started before that when I was first learning to read and read through our encyclopedia collection like bedtime stories (I was obsessed with reading anything in print once I learned how). I know that's how I learned about the internet.

  • Mhm my first FOSS was probably The Gimp two or so decades ago. Previous to that I used Corel Draw and Paint Shop Pro. Suse Linux on a CD followed soon after as a test, but it didn't hold me for long.

    • Wow. I also used to use GIMP about two decades ago, but I was a kid and I had no idea PS and Corel Draw existed back then. Since you mentioned already having experience with PS before Gimp, how did the two compare to each other at that time for you?

      • I didn't had experience with Adobe Photoshop (PS) back then. But The Gimp was quite similiar to the features of Corel Paint Shop Pro. The UI was quite different though, as PSP (7.0) had everything contained in their Main Window whereas The Gimp (2.0) was using the floating panels.

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • My computer suddenly died when I was an unemployed student, about 12 years ago. I had no money for a new one or repairs, etc. It was pretty devastating.

    Then I somehow discovered my city's local Freegeek, (the one in Vancouver BC) - I was able to buy an refurbished Ubuntu tower for $35. They showed me how to use it, invited me back if I needed help, and were generally super kind and helpful.

    It was a very nice introduction to the world of open source. I had no clue such a thing as free software and OS even existed before then. Ive been using linux ever since, as much as possible.

  • I can't say I actually recall. My dad was a software developer and into open source software so I was around a lot of that growing up. Firefox was my first web browser, OpenOffice writer was my first document processor. My dad installed some open source games on an Ubuntu machine for me to play. It was a little bit of everything.

  • I... is that a thing that people have?

    I mean, maybe I'm too old, but I don't know of anybody in real life that actively thinks there is a "world of open source". People mostly just use software. Software is either good or bad. It's either monetized or it isn't.

    Maybe I come from a time where a piece of software attempting to charge a fee was seen as a cute quirk, or the extra charge if you wanted a printed manual, but yeah, this doesn't make a ton of sense to me.

    • People mostly just use software. Software is either good or bad. It's either monetized or it isn't.

      This is true, but also, this ideology is mainly seen in Windows of macOS users - these users they just use software.

      But there most certainly is a "world of open source", and you usually enter that world when you switch to an opensource OS like Linux. And the reason why it's a whole new world is because you'd predominantly use opensource software on such an OS, so you're going from a world full of mostly proprietary software, to a world full of mostly opensource software - it's a stark contrast.

      So usually, at least for me, any talks of entering the "world of open source" usually begins with switching to, or trying out, an opensource OS. At least on the desktop.

      On the mobile space however, particularly in the Android world, there's been a growing awareness and desire among the privacy conscious people to switch to opensource apps. More and more folks are tired of the ads and tracking and privacy issues that plague proprietary apps typically found on the Play Store, so people have been increasingly looking towards opensource apps, which are free from such annoyances, and as a result, opensource stores such as F-Droid and Droidify have been gaining in popularity.

      So there's most definitely a world of open source out there, and the first step into that word usually beings with people getting fed up with corporations screwing them over, and thus looking for alternatives.

      • I have a bunch of asterrisks to that characterization. People on Android are on an open source OS and don't get into "the world of open source" much at all. That makes me think your narrative there is mostly true of performatively avoiding other software.

        Honestly, my first time installing Linux was in a different millenium, and my personal experience is that the "world of open source" you describe comes down to sharing notes and taking pride about the rough edges and bad UX involved in the process as a badge of honor or sign of moral purity.

        In my experience people using open source software that works well and integrates seamlessly cross-platform don't go to a different world. They just... you know, install Blender and do the work they need to do. Or use Android. Or set up a NAS and use it to store their files. Or have a Rapberry Pi and use it to play games. You know, they do things.

        I'm cool with open source. I'll prefer an open source alternative when two options are equal in features and UX. I'll be honest, though, if there is a "world of open soruce" as you define it, it seems mostly kind of annoying.

  • Android and Firefox. GIMP is also amazing... Krita is one I found recently

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

  • I started first in 2012-ish with Linux. That’s when I first heard of it, and decided to spin an VM with Ubuntu 12.04. Though initially I didn’t use it in real hardware for sometime, eventually I did install Fedora and been pretty happy ever since. Nowadays mostly use openSUSE and Arch.

  • I started with 4.3BSD on a VAX-11/750 in the mid 80s. At the time, you had to pay for a Unix license from AT&T, send a copy of the paperwork to UC Berkeley as proof, then they'd mail you a 9-track tape. (I think that was the process? I was just a lowly user on the system.)

    Not exactly what we'd call "Free software", but after all that you did end up with the full source code.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

162 comments