Thread: What can you do only with Linux?
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lardman is offline lardman
2010-11-18 , 23:35
Posts: 2,102 | Thanked: 1,309 times | Joined on Sep 2006
#10
Originally Posted by geneven View Post
In theory, you can modify programs yourself because their inner workings should be easy to view, something you can't do with proprietary programs.

By the same token, some developer can make modifications in programs. When it was discovered that the N800 had an FM Radio chip, it took about one day for someone to implement it so we could listen to FM radio! Now, imagine you had a phone that had an FM Radio chip and the environment was Windows or a Mac. Can you imagine that in one day it would be usable? I can't.
+1 to this. You can look at and change the code for a program you use (in most cases). This is the real appeal for me at least.

Indeed the same is also true of the OS - I use Ubuntu and for some reason Qt programs crash when you click on them, but someone worked out what the problem was (to do with xinerama) and released a patch, which I have then applied and I'm back in business. While I'm not overly impressed with the speed of Ubuntu at picking up this patch, at least I can do something about it myself, which wouldn't be possible with closed systems.