The Upsides!

[Gtrax]

What can I say? Despite all the bad stuff that drives me up the wall, I have partitions that go up to sda14, with 8 distros in there. (XP living in a Virtualbox with networking disabled on sda11 does not count as a distro)! Two of the distros get worked quite hard doing different things. One is an old favourite I keep tinkering with, and the rest are passing curiosities.

I just love Linux, for more upside things than I can comfortably deal with right now to select my favourite feature. So OK then, what is the thing that gets you best?

[rokytnji]

Now you're talking my Language. I like it that I can take a old box and get it working on the net. That I can even get it to play flash. That when a box pops up saying We have detected BLAH Virus, I have no worries.

I like the Tinkering aspect of it to. Whether or not i know what the hell I'm doing.
Just did a ZevenOS install today on a IBM T23. Borked it when I tried to fix a unlock network manager bug. Now going through reinstall and see if I can do better.

Linux has taught me so much about partitions, grub, files,Terminal, and I may not be a guru. But, I am a lot farther in knowledge than I was a couple years ago when I didn't even know how to turn on/operate a PC. Linux gets the credit for that.

[Jonathan183]

what is the thing that gets you best?

Have to vote for 2 - security & choice
The only problem I have is not going straight from MS-DOS to Linux ...

[questio verum]

Freedom. In so many interpretations of the word. Stability. The fact that once it's installed and configured, it just works. Unless you do something to it to make it not work. Not having to deal with virii or many of the exploits associated with using windows. (Actually, this falls under freedom, as in: 'freedom from'. )

Linux is not perfect or invulnerable, but it's a site better than the closed-source alternatives. Yeah... freedom.

qv

[D-cat]

It's made by the FOSS community, and NOT Micro$oft!

[darkrose0510]

Freedom

yep, I set MY computer up, MY way, with the software I want. If I want to do something I can, if I don't want to do something, I don't have to.

You couldn't pay me enough to lose that.

[GNU-Fan]

Freedom -- It's as simple as that.

[techieMoe]

As someone who reinstalls my operating system at least once a month, I get really tired of having to call, email or otherwise "activate" with various companies to beg their permission to use their software again. Some of the programs I have (Popcap, I'm talking to you) have a finite number of installs you can do if you purchased them online.

I can install Ubuntu with Gweled, Frozen Bubble, and Nexuiz as many times as I want and never have to ask anyone's permission. That's very nice.

[Gtrax]

Agreed! It is knowing that just because the source (of most stuff) is out there, ensures that it does not come with little exploitative spies built in. How many of us check the Firefox source? Just because we know we can, is the insurance against anyone risking mischief.

Another great upside is how the variety of distros and applications creates an evolutionary-type pressure to improve. If we discover a shortcoming when we compare, we fix it if we can, or eventually dump the distro if we can't.

Here is a little mischief example, pinched from Barry's Blog
Barry is fed up with Intrepid, so he started comparing. If you guys wanna play, then I put the little script here (so it copy-pastes without huge spaces).

#!/bin/sh
STARTSECS=`date +%s`
CNT=0;bCNT=0;bCNTold=0
while [ $CNT -lt 10000 ];do
 CNT=`expr $CNT + 1` 
 bCNT=`expr $CNT \/ 1000`
 [ $bCNT -gt $bCNTold ] && echo -n '.'
 bCNTold=$bCNT
done

echo
STOPSECS=`date +%s`
DIFFSECS=`expr $STOPSECS - $STARTSECS`
echo "$DIFFSECS seconds"

Like this, and in a hundred other ways, I just love the freedom to go for something better.

[oz]

Being able to make my own choices about what happens with my computers is worth a great deal to me. Options such as desktop environment, window manager, heavyweight distro, lightweight distro, rolling release distro, regular release distro, and many other such things make Linux the most attractive OS. The freedom to browse through literally thousands of different open source applications and pick the ones that I want at no cost is very valuable, as well.

It all boils down to personal freedoms and choice.