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What was your gateway product to open source?
(www.cnet.com)
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
Signed up for Ubuntu free CD. Got 10.04 LTS. Was such an improvement from vista on a core 2 duo and 3gb ddr2. Only moved complete to linux in 2019 after years of tinkering with couple RPis and getting the hang of using linux.
Free Ubuntu CDs were awesome back then. "What do you mean I can just order 10 and pay nothing, not even shipping and just give them away?!?"
Definitely beat having to order packs of Debian releases, because Internet was slow and CD burners were expensive.
I too had same reaction when i received three disks. Till then i hadnt held a professional CD of anything and here i had for free. Subsequently got fedora and got turned off by how laggy it was for me.
At that time my access to internet was through a relative and it took ~9 hours to download 1GB. Net plan was 5GB free per month except 11pm to 3 am something wouldnt count against the free limit.
I don't recall if there was any limit per person but it made clear it still cost them to manufacture and ship so asked not to abuse them.
I only ordered once and got the disks for ubuntu, kubuntu and server edition of 10.04.
Took me a few years to realise what the server edition even was. Sadly I lost all disks but pretty much used the ubunutu gnome disks quite well.