@eric5949 got tired of windows 8 .. tried an upgrade to windows 10 but it was even more shitty , so switched over to Linux Mint. Kept distrohopping till I reached EndeavorOSš„° it was a match made in heaven..
My first experience was with Red Hat 5.x back in the late 90ās, I got ahold of a huge book that came with it on CD. Since then Iāve used several distros both on my PC as dual boot, but also running a server. Iāve always defaulted to Windows again because of gaming mainly, and Iām honestly not a big fan of booting back and forth between different systems.
Iāve currently got EndeavourOS installed and am playing around seeing if I can get everything to work, and so far it seems this may be the time I actually switch for good.
Yes, Iāve populated most of my local area, and every time I go for a walk or bike ride, I add as much detail that I can. I also find it very enjoyable and itās pretty cool to see features I added show up in all kinds of mapping services that use its data
Osm now has the clearest and most detailed maps for walking that I know, and I use them in preference to the UKās ordnance survey maps, which donāt scale so well on electronic devices.
Back before I felt comfortable taking my expensive smartphones running with me for the GPS purposes, Iād manually enter my running routes into RunKeeper. I donāt know if they still use it, but back then their mapping was powered by OpenStreetMap. Iād add in stuff like sidewalks and trails that werenāt on the map yet to make my manual entries easier. I liked doing thisāit was kind of fun and I felt good contributing my knowledge of my local unimportant suburb to the world.
Iāve been surprised at how much is already on there, though. Out of curiosity I went to look at the map for my momās hometown of ~500 people in the middle of nowhere and found it surprisingly complete.
I still like OpenStreetMap, but donāt use it as much anymore. I wish there was a navigation app that used OSM data and was able to give me audio cues (e.g. āturn left at the next exitā), because thatās 99% of my map use these days. (And if there is one that I donāt know about, please let me know!)
Itās not even so much about F(L)OSS for me, itās mainly about privacy. Havenāt contributed so far, but been using it through Organic Maps. OSM lacks no address in my town, and thatās enough for me. I only need a map to get frow A to B, and Iād already know whatās at B if Iām going there in the first place.
After trying a bunch of FOSS map apps, Organic Maps comes across to me as completely superior. It's not as good as Google Maps for finding businesses and restaurants in most cities, but it's vastly superior for trails in the country side.
Also, you can contribute to OSM directly from Organic Maps, so if a restaurant is missing it can be added in a few seconds. :)
I think my first experience was around 1993 or 1994. I downloaded the 3.5" disks at the university and then uploaded onto my 386. No GUI, all command prompt. :).
Right around that time, too, I found some network cards and co-axial cables and 3-4 of us in the house put the cards in our computers and could see each otherās computer. Couldnāt do much else though. Hahahaha.
Pokemon Go uses OSM for the map data in the game. I've submitted park trails by tracing them in the satellite view and now the game has all the trails.
OsmAnd actually works pretty well in my experience, at least in the UK. It's not always up to date or fully-detailed but it's far from useless and I appreciate that. It's my primary map program on my phone.
Sounds like I might be the youngest here lol. I started with Ubuntu 11.04 which I would live boot off CD in my school laptop. After I got my own laptop with Windows 8, I used Windows for a good long while until the thing got super slow after having windows 10 for a while. Thatās when I got back in to linux.
Yes and yes! Couldn't contribute that much but I try to
I think having a highly important FOSS project that is not controlled by a company known for shutting down many of its beloved products (I'm talking about you Google) is pretty nice...
Also I think map quality is location-dependent. I live in a large metropolitan area in Southern US; OSM is usable, but there are no house/building numbers, and a good number of businesses are missing. In contrast I think the map is a lot better in Chicago which is a lot more pedestrian-friendly? Also, when I looked at Germany it seems OSM is on-par or better than Google Maps... in fact one of the larger rental websites use OSM instead of Google Maps (imagine Zillow doing it in US lol)
I used OSMAnd for a while before I got a data plan but found it next to useless as it would routinely take nearly an hour (not even joking) to figure out where I was.
Iāve been a Mac guy since 1985 but Iāve always had additional machines running other OSes (including Windows). My first Linux experience was with Yggdrasil, which my small company was trying out. We never got it to boot. After that, it was early Red Hat, which I ran for years until the hardware I was using died. After that, it was various versions of Ubuntu on machines at work. Now Iāve got a couple of Raspberry Pis running Raspian.
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