A quest to find a alternative to everything

I used to think open source applications were simply the inferior alternative that you choose when you don't have the money for the real thing, but then I started to notice how Blender suddenly looked almost equivalent to the industry standard apps when update 2.8 came out. That made me question my previous position. Fast forward a few years, I now proudly use Linux and FOSS applications whenever I can.

Entirely accidental. I'm not a developer and at most I had dabbled with a Linux in the past but nothing beyond a couple of VirtualBox VMs, I just didn't see or have a need for it.

Around late 2020 the note taking app Evernote changed a bunch of stuff. I had been using Evernote for years and suddenly they updated to a new feature-poor app and placed a bunch of restrictions on the free accounts. That prompted me to look at "free" (free as in money, not as in freedom) alternatives. I stumbled upon Joplin and really liked it. I noticed a few things I thought could be improved as well as a few bugs so I joined and started hanging around on the forums. At some point I realised I could probably fix one of these small issues myself (without any programming knowledge beyond some SQL) and, with some help and encouragement from some of the maintainers, was able to build the app from source, fix the issue and create a PR. I then got more involved with the community and started to improve the documentation.

That is when the open source bug bit me. I installed Linux as it just seemed (and was) easier than doing this kind of thing on Windows. I was invited to the Joplin team, got involved with Google Summer of Code as a mentor for Joplin and otherwise really got into it.

Then it all stepped up massively last year when GitHub announced they were killing off the Atom text editor. Whilst looking for alternatives I got involved with atom-community which then split off to create a fork of Atom, Pulsar which was a mad rush to get everything together. Not only save what we could of Atom (the package repository wasn't open source) but also to keep momentum going and make sure that those people using Atom still had somewhere to go and try to gather some sort of community whilst it was still somewhat relevant.

And yeah, otherwise now almost exclusively use open source stuff and try to get involved with the communities of other open source projects.

Reddit protests so I migrated to try kbin, lemmy, mastodon. Learned about fediverse, activitypub - than down rabbit hole to open source communities, then open source software…moved to linux and it’s a whole new world!

Great. I was tired of shitty stuff and fell into the rabbit hole. Here I am some two decades later and I love it. I contribute back by writing documentation since I lack coding skills, but I'm a technical writer for a living, so why not give back some of those writing skills?

Installed Linux first year of Uni. Made themes and graphics for KDE (they even rolled some upstream). Then moved to GNOME and made lots of GTK themes and OS assets. Still have my name on GIMP’s list of contributors.

The cool thing about open source is you can just jump right in.

I was poor... :P

Linux. And it was nice.

@shapis Almost 20 years ago, I followed Lawrence Lessig's RSS feed. He made a request for software that could be used to advance slides on a remote computer. I knew AppleScript fairly well and thought, "how hard can that be?". I wrote a one script that would "listen" for the text "Next Slide" in iChat and then try to advance whatever was open in PowerPoint. I wrote another script with a basic UI so the presenter could easily "type" Next Slide while presenting. It was basic, but it worked. I think I shared the code with an MIT license. Even though the code was free and Dr. Lessig already agreed to meet with a class about IP Law at the university I was working for at the time, he also contributed $50 to my project. He could have just downloaded the scipts and used them without paying anything, but that simple act changed my life. I realized that some people who could afford it would pay for code I even when I was giving away. Most people don't, but enough do that I've been able to continue contributing my code, helping to fix bugs in other people's code and sponsoring other projects today.

https://archives.lessig.org/indexb00c.html?p=2897

In 1996, with Linux. From 1998, I stopped using Windows. In 2002, I met the BSDs. After all these years, I am even more convinced that the only way to preserve data conservation, accessibility, and freedom is to manage and store them through open tools and protocols.

It was back in the early 2000s. There was a monthly magazine on Linux and my first issue included the complete install for suse Linux. I was hooked. It’s been a journey since.

How: Bumpy. Now I found a way to participate by translating and writing documentary, as most projects are lacking proper.

What: My interest in pursuing a more data-private life.

Where I'm from used to be pretty much a backwater country without any official access to western software. No credit card to purchase online, nothing. So we all use pirated software. 2000s were like the golden age of pirated softwate. I messed around with pirated/cracked software a lot when I was in uni, then I got hit with ransomware and lost all my assignments.

So I started giving opensource a try. I didn't know before that open source was actually a thing until I overhear some of my friends arguing about windows and linux. This was around 2007, so linux desktop is still a bit abysmal. I think tux guitar is probably the first opem source I used because pirating guitar pro starts to get too tedious. I started replacing pirated softwares I used to have with open source alternatives. IE with firefox Internet Download Manager with jDownloader. Guitar Pro with Tux Guitar. Some text editor with the name I forgot with Notepad++ Then I eventually moved on to linux, which took quite a bit long though, since I used to be a .NET developer.

Honestly, a lot of third world countries could benefit tremendously from open source software but we were all mentally locked in to windows, since youth. Most training center here only teaches windows. Even recent school curriculum seems to be focused on windows. We got so used to pirated software that's actually quite expensive to buy legitimately and people gets fussy if they couldn't use it. Such a shame...

I vaguely remember when I first heard about gnu and Stallman in the late 80s. Not sure what counts as open source. How about BSD? Was SVR4 or Research System 7 open source? Used those about the same timeframe and contributed one project around then. I used some open source tools for Solaris in the mid 90s. I think my first Linux install was in the late 90s.

Anyway it all went great and there was kind of a cultural vibe with the open source movement back in the day. All us computer related majors were all about it.

I installed vlc on a windows7 because the Microsoft Mediaplayer sucks (and still is the same).

A few things happened and I am running Linux as a daily driver and am a maintainer on a foss project. (even though I am not very active)

NewPipe

My first encounters with it were very rough to say the least. Developers getting used to the jankiness of the graphical user interface (if they had one), was commonplace, and often I was pulling my hair when I was forced to use older versions of Blender and similar productivity software, and any suggestions for UI improvements were met with massive resistance from the developers, due to wanting to avoid "spoonfeeding", and "not introducing users to write their own shell scripts, thus making them lazy and never discovering its feature of automating complex tasks".

However, this changed when I started to get into drawing and downloaded Krita. It showed me that open source software doesn't have to be an absolute nighmare to use, and not hiding handy but less-commonly used features behind a barely documented CLI. Even Blender became more usable in my experience than many more expensive 3D rendering software.

I was learning how to play guitar using ultimate-guitar.com. They have their normal tabs which are HTML and "pro" tabs which download in a format you need to pay for their software to use. Found the program TuxGuitar and it was amazing. Only learned years later as I was delving into Linux that it's named after Tux and is open source.

wanting more privacy + self-sufficiency. I think what really kicked it into gear was OMV. still love it to this day

I was a computer enthusiast on a budget, so trying out new software to tinker with and rice my desktop was pretty limited until I really got into Linux. Which I started to feel I had to when I hit more and more limits on windows.

@shapis I couldn’t afford a PC that could handle Windows 3.11 properly, and I had to delve into the source code to get the new Linux v1.0 release candidate kernels working on my Slackware system. I had no idea at the time that would be the basis of my career for nearly three decades now.