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

  • Hellfire103@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Mint was my first distro, too. Some videos from ExplainingComputers and Switched To Linux (before he was a bigot) got me interested in the distro, and then my uncle gave me an old ThinkPad and a DVD of Linux Mint 19.2 “Tessa”.

    After that, I installed Linux on all of my computers. I switched to Debian, then Fedora, then distrohopped for a bit before landing on my current configuration:

    • Garnet: openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma
    • Amethyst: Arch Linux with Sway (possibly soon to be Void with Qtile)
    • Pearl: crunchbang++ 12 (32-bit) with Openbox
    • LapisLazuli: Fedora 38 with MATE
    • Link.wav [he/him]@beehaw.org
      4·
      1 year ago

      I just recently put linux mint on an old gaming laptop, and it actually functions well now! After that, I installed it on this mini PC we use for streaming, and I’m thinking my next rig (or at Windows 10 end of service) will be some form of Linux. I always heard it was so hard to use. I actually find Windows harder to use because I’m constantly battling against it thinking it knows better than I do.

      • Hellfire103@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Whoever said Linux was hard to use was either a Windows/macOS shill, a Gentoo noob, or said it back in the '90s or 2000s when Linux was mostly quite hard to use.

        • Link.wav [he/him]@beehaw.org
          5·
          1 year ago

          I’ve seen it a lot. Maybe not on Lemmy, but it was definitely something people parroted all over reddit.

          Of course, I’ve also seen people on reddit say that Lemmy is so difficult to use, so I think a lot of people just say these things without having the slightest clue what they’re talking about.

        • ShranTheWaterPoloFan@startrek.website
          3·
          1 year ago

          I just swapped to Linux, and it’s harder to use than windows, sort of.

          I still can’t get one headphone jack to work on my case and my wifi printer/scanner can’t be controlled on the printer anymore. Troubleshooting has two modes, a step by step instructions set that either works or doesn’t, or highly technical stuff that is above my expertise.

            • ShranTheWaterPoloFan@startrek.website
              2·
              1 year ago

              I think it’s both an issue if hardware support and being the little guy.

              If Linux wants to be bigger it needs to change it’s selling point. People have been conditioned to think of free software as bloated ad-fests by their phones. My wife was asking how I liked Linux and I could only describe apps as the early Android app store where everything was free and generally great.

              Calling out Windows for privacy issues doesn’t have too much sway. Mostly because the damage is done, people have posted on Facebook and agreed to every tracker, what’s one more? Calling out Windows for being slower, showing you ads all the time and taking away features might have more traction.