Free Software

How has free software changed your life?

I used to be a cool 16 year old, I wasn't popular but was well known in my school. I was normal, I had a gf and went to parties. This was all until I heard of being a 'murica freetard. Now I read 8ch all day and make my living off of flipping Instagram meme pages. Free software ruined my teenage years, don't let it happen to you.

I can actually take control of my computing with all the free software I use. There's no more juggling licenses and installations.

Well, how? And are you aware that Instagram is not a free software?

Of course I know. I just repost and hashtag stuff

This is me. Now I am dead inside with no life ambitions

I learned windows
I used windows
I ate windows
and finally I got diarrhea
Windows doesn't want you to know how it works it wants you to use it.

I learned linux
I leaned to install a distro
I learned partitioning
I learned the design of the unix philosophy
I learned more about hardware
I learned about security
I learned about prism the shit that surrounds it
I learned how to conserve my privacy to some extent.
I discovered images boards
I discovered what it meant to be anonymous
I learned gnu
I learned the four freedoms
I learned licensing
I learned copyleft and copyright
I learned about patent
I learned about hardware freedom

If I wouldn't have discovered free software or even linux I would still be a dumb retard using a bloated OS to configure important infrastructures.
Now I am a happy freetard using gentoo with linux libre and trying to get the hurd and gnunet working .

I got to escape from Apple and Microsoft.

I was a slave, now I am a free man.

I didn't have to spend 150 dollars on Lightroom.

You are a dumb nigger you are the blackest retard gorilla nigger I have ever seen

gnu: 5 computers = $0
!=gnu: 5 computers = $letmestickmydickinyourpocketfortherestofyourlife.

The choice is yours.

How'd it taste? xD

It hasn't.

I mean, I love emacs, but I wouldn't call it life changing.

It made me appreciate that only proprietary software companies can create a polished desktop user interface. Spending time with Gnome3 and KDE made me appreciate macOS even more.

FOSS made me realize that while tremendously talented people donate their time to their pet projects, institutional support (university/corporation) is needed to produce most quality software worth using in a production environment.

Installing Linux got me into technology when I was 13. Now I'm a software engineer and work at Red Hat.

I'm sorry if you are jealous user, there's no need to call me a nigger or pajeet

Not really. It's just all the engineering power needed to push out a product. You can be a very good programmer, and produce the most quality code, but if you can't into product design, marketing, and all that jazz, your product's never going to get off the ground.
The most "quality" software is usually not made by corporations, but the product as a whole has actually some design put into it. There's a big difference there.

This is probably more illustrative if you look into the landscape of game development, where you just can't do anything without having at least a bit of all the different skills needed to make one, and even then, rare are the people that actually manage to create something good only by themselves. Most people are either good programmers, or artists, or musicians, or writers. Cooperation is very much needed, especially with the stark contrast between all those skills, and to do so you need some form of organization.

Same thing with regular software development, really, albeit slightly less.

off yourself

Where did you install it?

FOSS allows me to spend half as much on hardware upgrades while charging computer-illiterates (windows users) out the ass for routine tech support callouts guilt-free

On an Athlon Thunderbird PC I buit

Nigger, what are you doing?

Using FOSS has cost me alot more money thatif I just used the free windows that came budnels with my PC.

When I first tried Linux I had to buy a new laptop wifi card just to make it work without using ndiswrapper to try and use the windows driver module on Linux.

I had to buy NVIDA GPU rather than my brand new ATI when Steam for Linux was released because the AMD drivers were terrible plus I had to buy a new printer Linux didnt like my brother wireless one.

It has caused me to waste a fuck ton of my time fighting with it.

I hate M$ and their bullshit but I have to admit their stuff is stable for months while all my GNU shit is stable for hours, maybe a couple days.

Holy fuck, do you really believe this?

Institutions have the resources to do proper QA testing, individuals don't.

Well if your goal was to get me to cringe at that i did especially the fucking scrabble retard and his most likely fat wife.

Free software has helped me a lot though. I never actually understood the concept at all nor that of proprietary software. Entering into this world of autism has made me much more versed in software/hardware etc especially all the troubleshooting you end up doing with distros early on. I'm now a mid level debian user who's pretty familiar with most of the basics and a little of the advanced and I've been using it steady for about 3 or 4 years now. The philosophy of it is the greatest because you truly are oblivious to how fucked you get by proprietary software and the companies who own them when you're a basic user.

Free software gave me autism.

kek

Le crinnnnge xDD

You have to pay for software?

I don't have a nervous breakdown anymore whenever I have to deal with software.

Yellow, with a slight aftertaste of half past three in the morning.

isn't that basically what everyone does?

well been using some form of Linux for at least 10 years now, so at the very least it change by allowing me to waste my time those 10 years with whatever
but serious answer, it taught me how to really deal with computers

I pay thousands to develop my free software.

I spend $200 a year on jetbrains ides to develop free software.

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Proof or it didn't happen.

sage is not a downvote, newfriend.

I hope you're not really stupid enough to think that in the middle of a contentious legal process I'm going to post my mother's medical records and a bunch of legal documents to Holla Forums in order to prove something to an anonymous retard on the internet. Protip: that'd be you.

And if I did? You'd post right back with


The thread was about how free software changed our lives. I posted my story. I'm out. Fuck you.

Should be a pretty quick court case, fam.

That's not how machine faults work. Practising medical doctors are not trained software engineers nor medical tech machine engineers. It will take weeks for the team who developed the medical machine to systematically rule out each problem one by one. A single doctor isn't going to definitively figure out such a technical problem by himself within the time frames that you're implying.

Free software got me in shape. Played Stepmania for a while and I'm not overweight because of it.


Hospital should pick up the blame because the injury happened on their property, by their tools, with a hospital worker operating the machine. I am not a lawyer by the way.

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What does this has to do with free software?
If this story is true, it's more about jews fucking with your life.

How about you go kill yourself instead, faggot.

I can't waste my time playing vidya anymore. Thanks, free software!

I became addicted to toejam. It's like crack. It ruined my life.

Gave me more money to spend on food, so now I'm overweight.

Thanks a lot, free software..

Deployed right now. Everything is blocked. OpenVPN+VPS service and I'm back to dank memes and wasting my free time.

When I was young, I was taught there is no such thing as free, but when free software came around it made me believe there really was such a thing.

I didn't really thought about why people made all this software for nothing. I figured people were just really nice, living of donations. Then slowly I realized most of it is funded by parties who are out for my information. The big flashing "get your free this and that" banners may be gone these days, but the deal is still the same. The big guys are playing the game now and they've managed to lull even the more technically adept into a false sense of security. They've counted on people greed, with success.

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The fuck are you talking about?

Rawtherapee got good again with version 5, user.

so you'd rather have systems your life depends on be proprietary then? knowing how shit the software industry is, I'd rather depend on no software period, regardless of open or closed source
also
if story was real, it would be among the 2 other big stories that anyone ever cared about which were therac 25 and unintented acceleration ECU bugs. all the software we rely on is utterly fucked (and most of it is proprietary), but there are still only a few big stories to this day

retarded bait. literally no free software of any notability is profiting from user information

Awesome thread, I like this moments of share life stories.

I use gnu/linux since a kid. Things have changed a lot in the latter years. But all the changes were of course optional, and most of them were great.
Free software made me very curious about possibilities, and about how software worked. It also made me see Windows computer users like they were stuck in a land where they get no help from other users, and if they don't know how to do something either have to pay much money to somebody do it, or be called and treated like dumb. Which isn't right. Just because someone (say your girlfriend) doesn't know what a package is or a repository is, doesn't mean this person is dumb.
gnu/linux community is very open to questions and always help people, with good will and patience, and I think that this is very important. Free software changed my way of seeing life.

he thinks OP means free as in beer.

Go back to your cage, cango the tango

10/10, NSA has stepped up their game CONSIDERABLY

I've learned that free software is a very viable option that people don't see.

you have free versions of pretty much everything.

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