I just read a post online answering the question of why one “bothers” with Linux. I have to say that I fall into a mixture of his categories as well.

The main reason that I use GNU/Linux is that of freedom. I don’t like being told what I am allowed to do with my computer, and I am not a fan of restrictive license agreements that make it their entire business to tell you the great many things that you can’t do without violating some contract or law. Furthermore, there are often bugs in non-free software, and it’s very hard to (legally and technically) fix them, because you do not have the ability to make some changes to the program’s source code and recompile. Instead, you must become a pest to the company or developer that wrote the software and beg them to fix the bug. I don’t like begging, either.

A decent amount of the software on my computer is slightly modified, with various modifications being sent to the various maintainers for the software in places. Not every patch is accepted (some for stupid reasons, IMHO), but that’s alright, too: Free software gives me the right to run my locally-modified copy without anyone to yell at me and tell me that I can’t do that.

This also means that when people come to me to ask me to research a bug or try to find an issue out, I can do a far better job troubleshooting than I can when I am troubleshooting a black box. I can learn about what makes the software go “tick” and I can change that tick if I need to in order to fix the behavior of the application. I can’t do that at all with Windows, or Word, or whatever. Nor can anyone else in the community. One big issue right now is the fact that the closed, proprietary Flash plugin from Adobe is failing to work well with PulseAudio on Ubuntu’s forthcoming Hardy release. The problem is that Flash has a design flaw (this much as able to be found out by someone out there that’s good with binary code), and that design flaw is costing it some stability when it loads an external library for handling PulseAudio. If the source code to Flash were open, we—the community—would be able to fix it, and we would have a functional Flash player that worked well with the rest of the system. However, I don’t see Adobe going out and GPL’ing Flash anytime soon—do you? That would, of course, be ideal. If the Flash player is, for example, LGPL’d, then the community could improve the player—at no cost to Adobe—and even users of Windows might benefit, assuming that Flash is built from the same code base for the various platforms.

Anyway, that’s my little rant for now. I haven’t posted in a while, but things are going good—I am out of that dreaded Java™ class, so I am free to continue pursuing the language in my free time and trying to learn more about it. I have the feeling that I am simply not going to like it as much as C#, though; C# is faster, and I like some of the things that it does a lot better. I don’t think that there is any danger of C# going bye-bye anytime soon, given that all of the implementations of the .NET runtime are seemingly gaining in popularity. And it really seems to make development of applications faster, as best as I can tell. But, I’m getting off-topic…