Here's a third bite. But first, a little bit of backstory.
I'm a high school student, and as such, I barely have enough money to buy
things like expensive operating systems and proprietary software (not like I
would now, anyway). I've used GNU/Linux for some time now, and started out
using it with Ubuntu. When I first started out, I had a little bit of
proprietary software (the nonfree Linux kernel and Adobe Flash to name a few)
on Ubuntu. Back in 2009, I started having problems with the proprietary
nVidia drivers and Flash both deciding to act broken. Back then, I didn't
really know what "proprietary" meant since Ubuntu uses the term "restricted"
more. I always figured that everything in GNU/Linux was free and could be
fixed by everybody. Of course, I was horribly wrong. Everybody that was
experiencing bugs like these were stuck waiting for Adobe and nVidia to fix
their problems.
Well, I got sick of it and all proprietary software in late 2010, and started
wondering if there even were truly free versions of GNU/Linux out there. I
looked up "fully free ubuntu" and got results for Gobuntu, but realized that
there were no new versions coming out. That's when I changed the search terms
to "fully free linux" and found Trisquel, which was exactly what I wanted. I
installed it on my PC over my Ubuntu partition, and used it for two years.
Granted, I wasn't able to use my nVidia GPU with 3D acceleration at the time
because it needed proprietary drivers, so I stuck it out with my Intel
integrated GPU. As of last year, I finally was able to use my nVidia GPU
again with the nouveau DRI.
Today, I don't use Trisquel anymore except on a low-end server because I
don't really like apt-get, but I'm still sticking to freedom by using
Parabola GNU/Linux-Libre.
Anyway, backstory time over.
The advantages for me:
- All of my hardware on both my desktop PC and laptop (Alienware M11x) work
with Free Software.
- Extremely stable. I've had Trisquel running on my low-end server (an Asus
Eee PC 701) for 109 days now, according to "uptime".
- If it breaks, you can fix it. If proprietary software breaks, sucks for
you.
I still use Windows because I still have to use Adobe Flash (my online school
uses it for everything and Lighspark/Gnash can't render it), and I refuse to
use it in an environment where everything else is free/libre. However, all
the other work that I do can be done in a fully free environment. Free
Software rocks.
