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
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/
Like other people have said, I’ve used open-source software for decades without thinking about it, but what really made me think about it as a concept was when I got into Skyrim modding, and I saw the exorbitant subscription fees of Photoshop and then learned through that community about GIMP. Then, I started learning more about things like privacy and more tangible effects of corporate greed, and gradually switched to more alternatives.
However, I personally never tried a FOSS OS until the last couple months when someone on Lemmy talked me into trying Linux. I always thought it was only for people with high levels of technical skills, but it turns out there are distros that are extremely accessible to users like myself.
Man, that’s a rough entry point. I’ve been waiting for GIMP to get good for decades, and I’ve accepted now it’s probably not gonna happen.
You’re such a disappointment, GIMP. Blender is right there, why can’t you be more like Blender?
I think I’m blissfully unaware of what a good photo-editing software looks like since I’ve used GIMP for almost everything. I might struggle with an app that’s good actually, because I’ve learned in one that I’ve heard many times is hard to navigate.
Hah. Yeah, I guess it sucks having learned Photoshop before it was an outright scam, because there is no good alternative.
Let me caveat that: there’s actually great art software that’s either cheap or free and there are many basic quick photo editing apps. But broad image manipulation and in-depth photo editing? It’s GIMP or nothing, and GIMP is definitely not it.
I actually did use Paint.net at one point as well, because there was an improved format that GIMP just straight up didn’t support, so at one point I was creating textures for my mods in GIMP, then opening the files in Paint.net and exporting them again lol
To be fair, I’m not a graphic designer, but I did have to learn about things like using layers to create glow maps, so GIMP worked just fine for a scrub like myself, but I can understand for anything more serious it would have some limitations
Not a graphic designer either, so I also use it for, say scanning documents and stuff like that. But I’ll be honest, if it takes more than that I’ll often just load into some mobile app meant for the edit I need to make just to avoid GIMP’s backwards UI.
My biggest grip with mobile apps, even for simple edits, is that none of them seem to support layers. I understand maybe it’s a performance thing, but it sure would be nice to be able to do some very basic things in a pinch when I’m away from my laptop or PC.
Edit: *gripe
Yep. You either get the features but not the depth in mobile apps or the depth but not the features on GIMP.
It genuinely sucks. Because it’s not that the technology is proprietary at Adobe and can’t be replicated. Like I said, Blender holds up to the best of commercial software and it’s just as free. It’s that the GIMP guys haven’t quite found their way to that qualitative jump Blender took.
Note that for vector graphics editing, Inkscape is really good. That doesn’t help you if you need to edit photos, though.
Yeah, it’s just that specific hole in the landscape where GIMP has become the default and nobody else is doing better despite being the part of the ecosystem that Adobe holds with the tightest grip. It’s extremely annoying.
If you’re still looking, try Krita, it’s a polished and powerful open source image manipulation program.
I’ve tried Krita, but it’s primarily a painting tool, not really a Photoshop alternative for other tasks. It’s very solid for what it’s meant to do, though.
Makes sense. I never used Photoshop, so I don’t know how it compares. It’s been good enough for my needs so far.
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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.
Classy!
Linux for me as well. It was endless customization that hooked me
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.
Linux Mint. I was trying to edit a video and was struggling to get anything to work properly in windows. I was frustrated and looking for solutions on YouTube when I came across Mental Outlaws channel somehow. The rest is history.
Mint was my first distro. My interest begun with LibreOffice, then W10 got unusable for me and rest is history.
I distrohopped a year ago but returned to Mint
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fair enough. I guess the hardware support can make it tricky.
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.
@NumbersCanBeFun @graphito I distro shopped as well. Red hat, then Gentoo (5 years), then Debian (10 years) now arch (4 years). Each time there was an unavoidable reason forcing the change. Hopefully i never have to change from Arch again…
Using linux as an alternative to windows and really enjoying it.
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.
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!
Ubuntu Gnome GIMP
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.
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.
I got Slackware in 93 or 94 and fascinated by the idea in general.
Slackers Unite! I started with Slack 3.1 in '96.
Slack v3.0 in '95!
Nice!
My first contact to FOSS were probably Firefox, Open Office (before libre office existed) and Gimp.
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.
Wow. I also used to use GIMP about two decades ago, but I was a kid and I had no idea PS and Corel Draw existed back then. Since you mentioned already having experience with PS before Gimp, how did the two compare to each other at that time for you?
I didn’t had experience with Adobe Photoshop (PS) back then. But The Gimp was quite similiar to the features of Corel Paint Shop Pro. The UI was quite different though, as PSP (7.0) had everything contained in their Main Window whereas The Gimp (2.0) was using the floating panels.
Paint Shop Pro. . .
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in years.
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.
How do you feel about Microsoft now owning GitHub ;-)
Gimp, OpenOffice.org, VLC, Slackware, and on and on after that. Every flavor of Linux: RedHat, SuSe, Ubuntu, now on Manjaro and Endeavour.
