Well, you assumed correctly! And I also agree that it really depends on your needs. Whether it is the UI, hardware, apps, certain functionality, cost and so forth. For, me, hackablilty is very important. I don't know exactly how to describe the feeling, but when I successfully make a neat modification to my phone I really feel like I own it (hopefully that makes sense to somebody). I had a lot of fun modifying my N900, indeed those were the good old days, but after the Elop/N950 fiasco and Jolla phone not getting data in US making it pretty useless for me (except for when I brought it Switzerland with me last year), there hasn't been much to play with. So most of the time that I've spent modifying phones to my liking has been on the Android side. Further, companies like Samsung have been real good about making software and kernel available. Plus the hardware is quite good. So I've had fun modifying apps and the kernel on android. When the Jolla tablet was announced I was pretty excited because I had use for it and it would be a matter of time till I start playing with what's under the hood. But I guess that's not going to happen now. So that bad news for now is that there is nothing out there with reasonable up-to-date hardware, that is gnu\linux based (not the modified version found android), and really usable in the US. The good news is that Android is not as bad as many folks make it out to be, the hardware is excellent and it is fairly easy to hack to the point that you can do most things other OS can do if needed.