• Daeraxa@lemmy.ml
    11·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 year ago

      Wait Atom has a successor? I did the perfectly normal thing when I saw the sunsetting popup and stuck my head in the sand to gleefully wait for the day it suddenly stops working. I’ll have to check out Pulsar

      • Daeraxa@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yup, we even had a new release the other day. It will still be familiar to you as very little has otwardly changed, most of the updates have been behind the scenes - electron upgrades, a modern tree sitter implementation etc. We also have working package management thanks to a from scratch implementation of a new package backend. The blog section on the website has most of the backstory and is regularly updated.

  • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
    10·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • whereisdani_r@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    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!

  • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
    6·
    1 year ago

    I wasn’t satisfied with Windows Vista, but didn’t want to be forever stuck with XP, wasn’t going to buy a Mac because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money when I had a reasonable computer already… Found out about Linux and tried it. Funnily enough, I had used it for almost a year without actually knowing what open source meant, or what source is… I just saw it as “Ubuntu is free and isn’t Windows”.

  • nayminlwin@lemmy.ml
    3·
    1 year ago

    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…

  • DiagonalHorse@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • agent_flounder@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • andruid@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.