Free and Open Source Software

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What was your gateway product to open source? (www.cnet.com)

submitted 1 year ago by graphito@beehaw.org 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

(page 4) 23 comments

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[–] fital1ty@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

For me ist was FreeCAD. From there to Linux and down the Rabbithole

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch 2 points 1 year ago

I think it was Okular. I was looking for a way of editing PDFs without ads, invasive software, or subscription based payments.

[–] TechieDamien@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

OpenFOAM. I needed powerful software to do CFD that was free, as in free beer, and found OpenFOAM. To run it on windows, the installation instructions first step was install linux on a vm then follow the linux installation instructions. I did that and started using the vm for other stuff until I found myself using the vm for most tasks, but kept using windows for gaming. To learn more, I got myself a pinebook, which replaced most of the usage of my vm. When windows decided to self destruct, I had learnt enough to install and configure arch with minimal help. Now, nothing can persuade me to go back.

[–] Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

OpenTTD. Sure, I had used android, but it was the first thing I consciously knew was open source and enjoyed.

[–] HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

DDWRT technically came first for me, and m0n0wall, but OpenSolaris is where I really started to use it.

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