It’s not even so much about F(L)OSS for me, it’s mainly about privacy. Haven’t contributed so far, but been using it through Organic Maps. OSM lacks no address in my town, and that’s enough for me. I only need a map to get frow A to B, and I’d already know what’s at B if I’m 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 other’s computer. Couldn’t 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. That’s 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.
I’ve been a Mac guy since 1985 but I’ve 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 I’ve got a couple of Raspberry Pis running Raspian.
OsmAnd is my family’s go-to app for navigation. I didn’t notice it missing information compared to Google Maps. The opposite really, with several hiking trails or small side-roads not being on Google some years ago. The only issue it has is navigation for more than ~200km at a time. Often, it just times out if you try that. That’s why Google Maps is still installed on some devices.
I haven’t added anything actively. I think I might have enabled an option to send location data to improve the accuracy of the streets or something at some point, but I’m very unsure about that one.
I don’t have the most overpowered PC. I just have a small little desktop (Minisforum UM700) and Linux runs a whole lot better on it. My work also was giving out some old laptops that they were retiring (still better devices than my laptop which was a Lenovo T420) but they came without an operating system. I’ve always enjoyed using Linux but never made the full change because I would need MS Office and switching from Excel to LibreOffice Calc was just annoying. Since I didn’t need to do work on my personal PCs anymore, I made the switch and I love it. Games run better for me.
I currently use Linux Mint but I might switch to just plain Debian (or Linux Mint Debian Edition once they release LMDE6 which will be based off Debian Bookwork).
I switched in June 2021. I was a fan of libre software before the switch (I still am! Love me Krita, Kdenlive, LibreOffice, VS Code if you can count that…), and I saw that many people in that community, plus programming communities, use Linux. I heard that there were lightweight distros (my computer was fairly low-end), and a lot of customization options. I also wanted to try something new, so I ended up dual-booting W10 and Linux Mint, after trying LM in a virtual machine!
Now I have a new computer. It’s dual-booting W11 and LM 21.1 Cinnamon. I rarely boot into the Windows partition.
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