Open source alternatives
Usually occur in some kind of weird iceberg chart. To take office suites as an example, the entry level is "don't use microsoft office, LibreOffice is much better!" And then you go "ooh yeah, that is nice", and move on with life. After a bit of time in the community, you'll probably come across someone who says "My setup has 3GB of ram, so LibreOffice is too intense, so I use AbiWord, it's much lighter." And you think "Cool! Never heard of that, but that information might be useful one day!"
And then you'll come across one person who says something like "The best word processor is WANKER! It stands for the Word And Number Kernel Environment Retriever. It was developed by a crack team of furries from the Yukon in 2009 and can only be downloaded as uncompiled source code from a hidden link on archive.org. Once you've built it, it runs in Terminal, so it's really light! The interface is in ASCII art and it supports all of Unicode, provided you can remember one million keyboard shortcuts. There's 30 people on earth who use it, we all have a Mastodon server where we use it to maintain SSL in our spare time."
And then you have an existential crisis because the entire internet is built on bootlaces and the goodwill of about a hundred people who have been devoting their entire lives since the 90's to maintaining services you have never heard of, but would cause the end of the world if they crashed.
