I'm proud of Gilmour: he's come a long way since he couldn't get Linux to install, ever. I also salute his ideological purity. The world needs more of this, otherwise, we'd all be suffering from "smart quotes", and "byte order marks" and _NSAKEY.

Great article, and I like Dan's willingness to sometimes boot to Windows or OS X, when needed to get some task done.

I feel good using Linux even with some rough edges, but I am also practical minded in the sense that I have Windows 8.1 and OS X laptops available if needed.

I am not so happy with smartphone options. Basically, I am nervous about messing with my expensive Note 4.

I still think the alternatives require too much hand holding -- especially if you have members of the family that are not inclined to muck with their hardware (IE, they just want things to work). I'm hyper paranoid about backups, apps, etc. but I'm willing to buy into the general Apple ecosystem as a household for entertainment purposes -- media shared just works. It is often an interesting balancing act.

My whole family uses Ubuntu. There really very little hand holding, it just works. I actually spent more time hand holding with my partner had a Mac. When that machine died, we decided to go back to Ubuntu and a Lenovo thinkpad. It was a good choice.