I came to free software because I'm cheap about fonts.
A while ago, I set myself the criteria for the perfect font. In particular, it had to have a one-story a and g. After much searching, I found it in a font called FS Me. I loved it so much I paid $110 for a single license (huge waste of money) and made good use of it over the next two years.
Because of my interest in linguistics, I needed some fonts with good language support, and found some in Gentium and Charis SIL. To my delight, I found that their Graphite features contained glyphs of my perfect font, but Word 2010 could not access them. So I switched to LibreOffice and loved it. One thing led to another, and soon I was reading all about free software from the FSF's website. And then I took a leap and decided to install Trisquel.
On my first attempt, I'd read the documentation and expected that there would be an option saying "Install Trisquel alongside Windows 7". (I needed Windows; one of my documents could only be opened by Word.) However, that installation option wasn't there for me. Figuring I knew what I was doing, I went into the partition editor and configured it to override one partition I thought was unimportant.
Big mistake. Windows became unbootable; I got a Blue Screen of Death whenever I tried to boot it. Panicked, I called my computer manufacturer's (HP) tech support and paid $50 to learn that I had to reinstall Windows and lose all my files. I complied (only a few files I'd hastily backed up beforehand survived), but I actually didn't have to — the Windows partition was still there and accessible in the Trisquel installation.
After that I stayed away from GNU/Linux for a long time, but I was inevitably drawn back by my taste of the free software available for Windows. I figured that some freedom was better than none, so I tried for a long time to install Fedora before realizing they included proprietary software. (Also, it simply wasn't installing; bootloader installation kept failing even after I had freed enough disk space [the reason that my first Trisquel installation had failed]). Debian got a brief stint as my OS, but it was too unreliable and buggy. When I had just about had enough of GNU/Linux, my eyes caught the Trisquel Live CD that I'd used the first time...
I only used Windows twice after that successful installation, and I'm never going back. Eventually I overwrote it entirely, and boy did that feel good!
So there you have it. That's me, the guy who lost all his files to free software but uses it anyway. :) (Months after that botched installation, I'm still frequently finding myself saying "Hey, I have UsefulFileXYZ saved on my computer somewhere! Oh, right, the system restore...")
