I think it is underappreciated that what you can do with it is contingent on both the license and the values and motives of the devs and maintainers. There are

I think it is underappreciated that what you can do with it is contingent on both the license and the values and motives of the devs and maintainers. There are lots of things you can do with linux that you can't do elsewhere because it would break someone's business model. When I use linux it is mainly because of commodity. Since it's redistributable, I can install _all_ the software I want non-interactivly, without sitting around clicking on eulas and license keys and that kind of crap. This decouples your software environment from your hardware. You can pull the disk and put it in another machine if you feel like it. You can untar a backup into ~/ in a new installation, install all the software you use with a one-liner, and you're good to go in a few minutes like nothing ever happened. I buy laptops two at time. If this one gets stolen today, I'll get the other one out of the closet, and I'll be back to where I started in the time it takes to drink a couple of coffees. I can't stand the idea of my productivity depending on a specific piece of hardware, cloud-login credentials, license keys or whatever.