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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.
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
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.
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”.
This is a big problem. Linux is not free, development costs just as much as other platforms
Like I said, at the time I didn’t even know what open source meant and assumed that Linux is a product, and Ubuntu was the company that made it. I know better now, but back then I just saw it as a “replace Windows without spending money”. Also I was a teenager, and I would have pirated anything back then without a second thought even if it weren’t free.
Also, since Linux is so widely used by corporations, they fund its development, so I prefer to donate the small amounts of money I can to smaller projects.
Linux ≠ Linux Desktop
This is a huge problem in the community and the decentralized nature. Like, I dont even know what projects I all use, like curl, ffmpeg, bubblewrap, flatpak, systemd, all these things and again, these are well known projects.
This is a huge funding problem as only GUI apps can ask for funding. Corporations often dont fund small projects, but often just the kernel and Core apps.
Not shaming teenage you of course :D
Linux ≠ Linux Desktop
I’m aware, I was just explaining my experience back in 2007. It was like moving to a new country where things work differently and the attitude needed was very different from what I am used to.
Idk, I think we talked past each other
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…
wanting more privacy + self-sufficiency. I think what really kicked it into gear was OMV. still love it to this day
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.
“oh damn, that shit is expensive”
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!
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.
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.
@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.
@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.
Anki
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.
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?
A quest to find a alternative to everything
