Free and Stuck Up

So, back to Linux.

It is a wonderful thing that Linux happened. The principle it propagates, "free", may have been the biggest leap of human society in the 20th century. However, for somebody totally uninterested, or unaware of what is free (as in freedom, not as in free candies in the back of that man's van), it might be frustrating.

Now this is maybe the fourth time I installed Linux on my laptop in the last 6 months, but every time I do it, I have to look online for help, because all my media files can't be played. I understand it perfectly, that these files are encoded with propriety formats and therefore need a decoder that is not free albeit gratis, or even worse, propriety, to play, but it would be much better if the vendor just put some information somewhere easy to find, like for example on the fucking desktop, instead of us having to type our problems into online search engines, which hilariously and ironically, are all propriety, just to know that we need packman and this special package called "gstreamer-0_10-fluendo-mp3" in order to play mp3 files in Clementine (spoiler alert: fluendo is NOT free - oh God, oh Heaven, oh Sky, what a blasphemy that someone dares developing non free shit on our free platform!).

On the one hand, I think it's good that people try to enforce this idea of freedom. On the other hand, I think many of them are so stuck up on some kind of higher moral ground that they put themselves in, that it makes free softwares and free format repulsive to beginners and/or potential users who are converting from propriety software usage. I knew Ubuntu since 2008 or even earlier, but only after 7 years was I convinced to switch completely to Linux. And it will be a long time until I get rid of my mp3s and avis.