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I haven't written a long, rambling editorial on why I do what I do in quite some time. Guess I lost the juice for it. But I just got rejuiced (perhaps it's my upcoming speaking engagement, for which I'll sound less rambling, I hope), so here's a lovely stream of geeky consciousness on why software freedom and/of choice is a great thing:

Much of what I write about here concerns how I aim to do everything I can to match up the best hardware and software to get a given job or jobs done.

That's why I don't advocate GNU/Linux or OpenBSD for everything, even though I spend most of my time using them on my systems.

There are times when Mac OS X is the best system for the job. That's especially true for me when it comes to editing video. I'm sure there are apps on Windows that are as good as Final Cut, but I sure haven't heard about them. And I'm pretty confident in saying that there's not much out their in free, open-source software world to match it.

There are also probably times when Windows is a reasonable system to use. I'd love to say there was an image editor for Mac or Unix/Linux that was as good as IrfanView at what it does. I haven't found that, either.

I'm not talking about servers at all here, just desktops. For the great majority of uses, a Linux or BSD desktop can run better and do just about everything you did on a proprietary operating system. And most Unix-like systems can do quite a few things your Windows box can't do, including (in my case) running the whole damn day without the apps robbing all of my memory and sending the box into a cascade of soul-killing swapping.

Right now, when I'm not cutting video, I can — and do — get just about all of my work done on a 2002-era 1.3 GHz Celeron-powered Toshiba laptop running OpenBSD 4.4. I have an identical laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS that I set up when the Opera browser was acting up. I've since fixed up Opera in OpenBSD (putting the words opera:config in the URL window, then clicking open Performance and clicking the Synchronus DNS Lookup box) and haven't needed to use the Ubuntu laptop.

But if I suddenly needed access to an up-to-date Flash player (Opera's Flash player works, just not in all instances), I have the Ubuntu Toshiba. And if I wanted to experiment with video editing in Cinelerra, KDEnlive or any of the other up-and-coming video-editing apps for Linux, I could use Ubuntu, for which most developers seem all too eager to build a package of their app.

(If I needed sound, however, the OpenBSD laptop can't help me. The system configures sound fine, but the sound hardware itself broke. That's what happens when you pull a laptop from a pile destined for the trash and somehow get it working. The sound works in the Ubuntu Toshiba, and I could always swap the drives if I absolutely needed sound in OpenBSD ... if I could figure out how to extract the hard drives, that is.)

Say I really needed to edit video in a super-professional kind of way. I imagine that whatever employer was asking me to do just that would provide me with a modern-day Mac, Final Cut Pro (or Express) and a huge hard drive that could hold all that video. (You can't do much with 10 GB on an old laptop drive.)

(Another somewhat related aside: On my 14-year-old Sun Sparcstation 20, acquired strictly for masochistic hobbyist purposes, OpenBSD runs great, but NetBSD will probably win out due to a much-larger number of precompiled binary applications for the 32-bit Sparc platform. That and Debian's stubborn refusal to install ...)

Getting back to the bread-and-butter computing I do with Web browsers, text editors, anything I need an office suite for, most image editing (right now I'm trying to figure out how to best batch-process images in Unix), even audio editing, which is 98 percent of what I need to get done, I can do it in a FOSS operating system and the applications that go with it.

Why I use OpenBSD instead of Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD or any number of other systems is both a decision for the moment (one that could change at any time) and a function of what I want to do with that system. Part of the whole equation is learning and having fun, and OpenBSD has certainly succeeded on that score. Not only do you have to get a bit deeper into the configuration files of the OS itself and of the apps to make things happen, but usually the documentation is good enough to guide you to the right solution.

And even if the systems aren't all that similar, what I learn in one OS is generally helpful and applicable in another. That's where the hobby portion of this whole thing enters the picture. I have a good time taking this old hardware and making it work as well as I can with whatever software tools are available to me, and my decision to use OpenBSD right now means that in my own personal/technical journey, this system seems to have what I want technically and philosophically. And the OS handles this hardware as well as anything else, sometimes better.

It's only been a few weeks since I made the decision to use my Windows box at the office less and less (due to ... Windows) and set up the laptop every day and use it not just to test new OSes and apps but to get 90 percent of my work done on any given day. To go from installs all the time, a bit of blogging and Web-browsing in FOSS OSes to coding and editing all day on them is a big evolutionary change for me.

And it's been going very well.

I've said it before: We're very lucky to have so much FOSS out there and not be forced in most cases to use proprietary operating systems and applications to make our computers useful. (Here's the point where I thank all the developers out there who have put this stuff together over the last many years.)

I don't know if we're at the point where every casual user can pick up a Ubuntu-equipped PC and be totally happy. That state of total happiness doesn't exist for Windows or Mac users, either.

But we're getting closer (and not just with Ubuntu). There's got to be the proverbial Malcolm Gladwellian "Tipping Point" somewhere in this realm, and while I'm not ready to declare 2009 "The year of" anything, you never know what's going to bring free, open-source software to the next level for an individual (or groups small, large and enormous). I could list a bunch of things, but I've got work to pretend to do ...

Ah, the Linux (or BSD) distro review. They're relatively easy to crank out, they bring the traffic in a major way (especially when the excellent Distrowatch links to you).

But do they mean much? Not really, I think.

Most of the time it's the usual:

• "Here's what happened when I tried/failed/succeeded in installing Distro X on Hardware Y"
• "The installer is good/bad/barbaric"
• "Networking/printing/X was easy/hard/impossible to set up"
• "Package management is like Debian/Red Hat/Slackware and is good/bad/barbaric"
• "Repositories are big/small/good/bad"
• "My favorite apps are present/absent/broken"
• "The default desktop/menus/window manager are good/bad"
• "The community is active/nonexistant/helpful/hostile"

And the list goes on. I feel like writing a shell script that can pose questions and crank out automatic distro reviews.

What's harder to write — much harder than the quickie distro review — is a long-term review of a distro after a month or more of heavy use.

For one thing, most of us don't want to spend long periods of time running distros we don't like or aren't familiar with.

And for any given user, most of the 300+ active distros out there won't do anything for our hardware and work patterns that we don't already get from the distros we're currently using.

That's not to say that the many, many dozens of distros out there should just give up and stop trying to do something better and different (even though what they're doing is usually based on an existing distro and often doesn't add much, if any value to what they're already copying).

I'm just saying that after after a year and half of writing this kind of thing, I'm tired of both writing and reading quickie distro reviews that don't really tell the potential user of a given distribution all that much that they can use in making their decision.

I've already done tons of posts on Debian Lenny, and almost every problem has been fixed at some point in the project's long road from Testing to Stable.

So should I do another distro review on the installation, care and feeding of Debian Lenny when it finally does receive its Stable status?

Do I need to reinstall Ubuntu every six months and write about how that goes? OpenBSD?

Never mind that the development of OpenBSD is purposefully more evolutionary than revolutionary, or that a rolling release might be better/worse than one that comes out every six months or at some other regular (or not so much) interval.

I don't quite know how to end this tortuous post except to say that I reserve the right to change my mind. Maybe I'm purposefully shoving my own head in the sand by not embracing your favorite distro (usually Slackware or Mandriva) and sticking to what's been working for me (Ubuntu, Debian, OpenBSD, Puppy ... and that's about it these days).

Maybe it's part of the evolution (or devolution) of me as a writer about technology, but right now I'm convinced that that there's a better way to do all of this that doesn't throw out free, open-source software in favor of what the average guy/gal is using (Windows/Mac) but also does more than preach to the same creaky choir, of which I myself am a warbling member.

Being more truthful, I won't stop reading distro reviews, especially when they're written by writers who know what they're doing. But I plan to be a whole lot more careful about writing them. I've been thinking (and writing) for some time about why it's more than time for me to stabilize my herd of machines and stop the endless process of cranking one distro after another onto their partitions.

The freedom to change distros like underwear, at more than one level, begins to detract from what a computer operating system is supposed to be for, which is getting stuff done. I guess I want things to be more about ends rather than means.