Free and Open Source Software

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.

Windows. More specially a netbook with vista, that ran so incredibly slow ot of the box that it pushed me to install linux. Technically i used Firefox before that, but that was when Firefox was the de facto standard in Germany, so i didn't care about FOSS.

Linux distro. It was a time were my area of interest was IT and I read a lot about it and tried several Linux distro.

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.

For me-

• Linux
• F-Droid

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.

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

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.

Probably Mozilla.

For me those products are:

• Linux
• Firefox
• Bitwarden
• Libreoffice

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 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.

Blender 2.9.3 LTS

Apache Web Server

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?

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.

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.

Ubuntu 9.04. Jaunty Jackelope in 2009. Started by dual booting my Windows laptop. XP mainstream support ended that year, and I didn't want to upgrade to Vista, nor could my laptop handle 7.

Ubuntu, maybe around 2007-2008.

I was starting college and got my first notebook. Up to that point we had only a desktop PC for all the family and this was the first time I could actually try things out without messing with my brothers’ stuff, so I eagerly jumped to try new things and format my notebook every 2 months after completely screwing something up.

The thing that hooked me up was the breath of fresh air in terms of customisation that a Linux distro offered compared to Windows. Funnily enough the mac OS style was my favourite so I eventually ended up buying a mac, but I always maintained a distro on bootcamp.

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.

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.

Stumbled upon Novell Suse Linux in the software section of Best Buy. That sent me down the rabbit hole. I actually got caught up in the world BSD specifically DesktopBSD. I was amazed by all the “free” software options.

Not technically the first, but what got me into it was libre office. I was too broke too afford word so I was looking into alternatives.

tachiyomi

It surely don't count but reddit

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.

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.

"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

I had been using some form of UNIX and some early GNU utilities for a few years by time Linux came out and had heard some rumblings about 386BSD (development started in 1989) via newsgroups, but it remained out of reach for me.

I heard about Linux (SLS Linux) being available late summer of 1992 and started saving for a 386, which I build later that year.

In the end, due to download limitations I started with HJ Lu's boot/root disks for Linux (floppy disk images), starting with kernel version 0.12 and happily living in the terminal.

Virtual terminals were the killer app that kept me solely on Linux for a long while. Being able to download on one terminal and code in a 2nd (I programmed a MUD for free dial-up Internet access for a local system) was amazing and far better than Windows 3.x during this time frame.

I'm so old, when I started, software was either part of the operating system, or we had to get it for free, as source to compile it locally. Yes, there were commercial software packages for some applications, but most of the everyday stuff (editor, file browser, file transfer programs, multi-user online games and their clients) was open source. And many of us contributed, me included. I wrote Gobelin, an NNTP news reader/filter/aggregator, and Connector, a frontend for multi-user online games.

@graphito Red hat Linux back in 99. Ran X11 Gnome with Metacity, bash and emacs. Still using Linux today. But Im on Arch with zsh, kde/plasma Wayland and NeoVim. Probably the only thing that I still use now from '99 is less 😃

Signed up for Ubuntu free CD. Got 10.04 LTS. Was such an improvement from vista on a core 2 duo and 3gb ddr2. Only moved complete to linux in 2019 after years of tinkering with couple RPis and getting the hang of using linux.

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)