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/

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

Apache. This was over 20 years ago. The web server that everyone seemed to be using was free to download and open source. That made a big impact on how I viewed free software, and encouraged me to use more of it.

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

Gimp, OpenOffice.org, VLC, Slackware, and on and on after that. Every flavor of Linux: RedHat, SuSe, Ubuntu, now on Manjaro and Endeavour.

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.

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.

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.

My first contact to FOSS were probably Firefox, Open Office (before libre office existed) and Gimp.

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.

I got pulled in after hearing the term "copyleft". Red hat 6 was out (version numbering scheme has changed since then). I was a teen and into skateboarding and punk so I was attracted to this legal document that used the system against the system. I became a Linux evangelist to fight back against Steve Ballmer and big bad Microsoft. Felt good to have a glimmer of hope.

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).

Slackware Linux, on a bunch of floppies. Oh man, when did I get old?

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.

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.

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.

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.

For me, Blender was probably my very first introduction into FOSS. I was using it because it was free, but I also liked the concept behind having a useful software the people used everyday to make cool projects like movies and animated shows. I did a project on it in. What really got me down the rabbithole was Debian. I had come across it in computer class, and I really liked the interface. i did more research and came to love Debian for being a stable distro run by the community. From thereit's history.

Python.

Also just getting away from MacOS and Windows. That was running away not toward though. Python was the towards.

Not my first libre product, but definitely the one that got me into searching for libre alternatives - OpenOffice. Despite not being great at the time (or ever), i was amazed by how complicated microsoft turned 365Office into. I suddenly had to buy subscriptions to all of the office products for outrages prices just so that i can have a simple words editors? Screw that, i googled for "open source office software" and never came back to m$Office.

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.

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.

• OpenOffice
• Firefox
• Thunderbird

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.

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.

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

I came across Linux sometime in the late 90's. It was free (as in pricetag, which is all I cared about at the time) and different so I was curious. The PC I was using wasn't mine so repartitioning wasn't an option but I found some ready to go boot from dos linux distro and gave it a go. And I loved it! And still do.

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.

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