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.

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.

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.

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

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.