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

  • macniel
    7•10 months ago

    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.

    • @Mothra@mander.xyz
      2•10 months ago

      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?

      • macniel
        2•10 months ago

        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.