Like four years ago. Yet every so often he writes this piece again about how great it was to move to Linux, basically because large corporations are bad. And it’s true. He’s not wrong. Large corporations are bad. And at least Gillmor seems to have found a better footing to write this same piece on by playing up how Linux works for him and dropping fear-mongering like suggesting Apple’s going to lock OS X down like iOS.

Every year I try Ubuntu and every time I find it an excessively fiddly environment that gives you all the tasteless design choices of Windows with all the confusion of why your sound card isn’t working that you got installing your own Sound Blaster in 1995. I’ve also tried other Linux distributions that look promising but aren’t all there yet. So I don’t feel like I’m being unreasonable. (Well, for me.)

I get the arguments against Microsoft and Google and even Apple (although Gillmor can never seem to bring himself to mention Apple’s push back against back doors). But I guess I just don’t want to pay for them all day long by using a phone and computer I just don’t like working with.

Maybe I should care as much about open computing environments as Dan Gillmor and Cory Doctorow and that guy who ate part of his foot do. Maybe I should also quit working and devote my whole day to dental hygiene like my dentist wants me to. Neither is very likely to happen.