Mine was Inkscape, back in the early days of the MLP fandom, when I learned I could make show-accurate art using this entirely free computer program. Which lead to using it to make like, memes and shitposts and stuff for fandom shit.
Like I’d used free software before – But seeing Inkscape in action and then, a year later, getting into college for design-related stuff and learning that people used Adobe Illustrator (which costs a fortune) for the same things was my ‘oh cool, my free thing can do most if not all the stuff this expensive tool can’
'Twas GIMP for me. I use it all the time for work (not graphical design, just basic business engineering stuff like annotating photos for figures in documents and such). The companies are too stingy for Photoshop for a person in my position and I refuse to turn in janky MS Paint markups.
One company IT tech that I requested an install for GIMP on the computer said that I was the only one using it in the entire company (5000 people). I was like, what, how do you all annotate figures and whatnot. Just a shrug in response, leading me to think it’s MS Paint.
mine started with valve. just hearing about them making contributions to stuff like wine or proton for free at first, then getting my hands on a steam deck and being introduced to Linux for the first time, and it was all downhill from there
Redirector did it for me. The I found out about libredirect and started using alternative front ends for everything. from there I switched over to Linux and that’s all she wrote
I was lucky because my dad has always been a linux user so I’ve been using open source software since my first computer. I’m now in college for computer science and I don’t think I would be if I hadn’t been exposed to so much good open source software
Mine was taking up software development as a kid. “I made a cool program that solves a particular problem I’m having. I wonder if others might also want it.” Not much later I discovered the concept of FOSS.
For me it was because I had a super old computer, and Windows refused to run smoothly on it. So I installed Xubuntu, and it ran better than most computers ran on Windows.
VLC almost did it for me until I found XBMC (now named Kodi). Which wasn’t as stable as VLC but had better features and was multiplatform too so from there I decided to give Linux a try after windows borked my pc since i only wanted xbmc hooked up to a tv.
I’m trying to remember what my gateway drug into FOSS was. VLC is a strong contender, but it might’ve been OpenOffice for me
Mine was Inkscape, back in the early days of the MLP fandom, when I learned I could make show-accurate art using this entirely free computer program. Which lead to using it to make like, memes and shitposts and stuff for fandom shit.
Like I’d used free software before – But seeing Inkscape in action and then, a year later, getting into college for design-related stuff and learning that people used Adobe Illustrator (which costs a fortune) for the same things was my ‘oh cool, my free thing can do most if not all the stuff this expensive tool can’
From then on there was no going back.
'Twas GIMP for me. I use it all the time for work (not graphical design, just basic business engineering stuff like annotating photos for figures in documents and such). The companies are too stingy for Photoshop for a person in my position and I refuse to turn in janky MS Paint markups.
One company IT tech that I requested an install for GIMP on the computer said that I was the only one using it in the entire company (5000 people). I was like, what, how do you all annotate figures and whatnot. Just a shrug in response, leading me to think it’s MS Paint.
Mine was Windows. It became so bad I decided to say “fuck it, linux might be hard but anything is better than this bullshit”.
Now I know that windows isn’t just a bad implementation of an OS, it’s fundamentally a bad concept. If you can even call that mess a concept.
mine started with valve. just hearing about them making contributions to stuff like wine or proton for free at first, then getting my hands on a steam deck and being introduced to Linux for the first time, and it was all downhill from there
Redirector did it for me. The I found out about libredirect and started using alternative front ends for everything. from there I switched over to Linux and that’s all she wrote
I was lucky because my dad has always been a linux user so I’ve been using open source software since my first computer. I’m now in college for computer science and I don’t think I would be if I hadn’t been exposed to so much good open source software
Mine was taking up software development as a kid. “I made a cool program that solves a particular problem I’m having. I wonder if others might also want it.” Not much later I discovered the concept of FOSS.
For me it was because I had a super old computer, and Windows refused to run smoothly on it. So I installed Xubuntu, and it ran better than most computers ran on Windows.
I was gonna say Evil Player for me, but looking back, it was free but not opensource. So probably Firefox, then Ubuntu for me.
VLC almost did it for me until I found XBMC (now named Kodi). Which wasn’t as stable as VLC but had better features and was multiplatform too so from there I decided to give Linux a try after windows borked my pc since i only wanted xbmc hooked up to a tv.