What Excites You?

[Bayard Coolidge]

What excites me about Linux?

- Multiple possible solutions for the same problem.
    I am in the midst of some legal work, and the lawyer e-mailed the 
parties a document
with a .wpd document. I first threw it at StarOffice 5.2, and it gagged. 
Nothing with a '.wpd'
suffix was in the menu, and I didn't remember offhand what it was, 
either. But the 'file'
command did (head slapping forehead), and I then was able to invoke 
AbiWord, which
smiled and brought up _most_ of the document. I was then able to roundly 
chew out the
attorney for using fractions instead of decimals, and was also able to 
create a copy in
Microsoft Word format so that the other parties could read it. (How did 
I know if the
.doc file was in Word format? Simple, I went back to StarOffice 5.2 and 
opened it there,
and it came up all funky just like the last Word document I got. 
Temporarily dropped the
font size by a couple of points, came up beautifully, and I shipped it 
out!).

So, I was able to use a couple of different tools, neither of which had 
been developed by
Corel or Microsoft, to solve an interoperability problem between 
proprietary formats.

- I can run seti at home and do so with either their X11 display (which is 
cool, but only
permits one copy per X11 server invocation) or a Tk display (which 
allows multiple
copies to be run, one per seti at home invocation). I have two systems, and 
each system
has two processors, hence I run two copies of seti at home on each system.

- I can download, patch, and play with various amateur radio satellite 
tracking programs.
Key thing is that I can patch them to suit my needs, since the source 
code is generally
available. Ditto for various antenna design programs (NEC and its 
descendants).

- I like being in total control of MY system.

HTH,

Bayard