At about this time in my blogging "career", I'd have to assess that I'm at least one of the top five online pundits who have made a name for themselves by taking the Gimp's side in the Gimp vs. Photoshop debate on the side of Gimp. And not just Gimp, but Gimp Classic, as opposed to Gimp-in-Photoshop's skin. And not just taken sides, but dug a foxhole from which to lob mortars.

I know that it might not seem like it at times, but I’m a big Ubuntu fan. I haven’t fully figured out how and where it fits into my computing ecosystem yet, but I know that it does have a place there. One aspect of Ubuntu that particularly impresses me is the clear development time-line that is published and adhered to. You always know what’s coming and when to expect it.

I cannot count how many times I receive e-mails where I hear about the poor soul who opted to take whichever distro for a test drive, only to discover that Compiz, Beryl, and these days; Compiz-Fusion has left the user scratching their head. To be clear, I believe you should be using Linux for intelligent reasons: secure, free and customized to suit your needs.

I do enjoy the Kubuntu development cycle. Just as I’m starting to feel that my stable, long-configured system is starting to get a little blase, the new version is just around the corner. I eagerly upgraded to Kubuntu Gutsy when it was released on my faithful Vaio TX.

Seems to me that any company becoming successful and having some sort of influence is a massive target for mindless ravings and rantings about how the said company is destroying the world. Of course I am referring to the latest series of rants and raves about Ubuntu, giving it a right good kicking. At the end of the day, does it matter?

For a number of reasons, I have opted to leave my cube spinning days behind me, as it just did nothing for me. Certain applications ran poorly in Beryl, and while no fault should be placed on its development, I was finding myself booting into Metacity more and more for my GNOME desktop.

Best Buy's Geek Squad has certainly enjoyed its share of press in recent months. But I found some amusing things about some of their policies -- which were recently leaked to the public (thanks to a link found at Digg.com). The policies demonstrate that the "agents" are expected to make legal judgment calls regarding such applications as P2P options.

After an interesting free software licensing event in Helsinki, I got thinking about licence complexity. At the conference, people had two types of questions (a) Why didn't GPLv3 additionally solve X problem? and (b) Why is it so long?