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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.
A quest to find a alternative to everything
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!
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.
I see this attitude from time to time. At some point a friend asked about a cheaper alternative to Adobe to cut some videos. And I suggested Kdenlive and another alternative (maybe OpenShot) and OBS to record the screen. Yet they chose to use some free version of a gamer screen recorder and I don’t know which Videoeditor that just cost $15 or $25. And the result was an ugly watermark from the screenrecorder and cuts and text that looked worse than what I did with Windows Movie Maker in 2003. I’m still puzzled.
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
“oh damn, that shit is expensive”
