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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.

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

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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

Python.

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

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 started with 4.3BSD on a VAX-11/750 in the mid 80s. At the time, you had to pay for a Unix license from AT&T, send a copy of the paperwork to UC Berkeley as proof, then they’d mail you a 9-track tape. (I think that was the process? I was just a lowly user on the system.)

Not exactly what we’d call “Free software”, but after all that you did end up with the full source code.