I've been trying Trisquel on a multi-boot laptop for the past week or so, mostly out of curiosity and a desire to try a different and slightly unusual distro rather than a hard-core embracing of their ideals - they seem well-meaning and sincere, and right on a number of issues, but also hopelessly removed from reality/pragmatism and ideologically entrenched on a number of issues that are various flavours of difficult to agree with them on ( a sort of Green Party of computing, if you will). Anyway, I was wondering what people think of Trisquel specifically and Free Software in general, if it's possible to have that discussion without ideological arguments.
One thing I have noticed is that although it's a damn sight more polished and usable than the last time I tried it as a live distro a few years back, it still works as a productivity aid since so few bells and whistles work whilst browsing websites in either Abrowser or Icecat. Freedoom was a nice surprise/consolation though...
If not then I apologise to the mods, and will of course happily delete this thread.
Trisquel doesn't include any non-Free software, which includes Adobe Flash. There's a Free alternative called Gnu Gnash, but it doesn't work particularly well because Flash is such a mess that it's extremely difficult to reverse engineer.
I think that the Free software zealots like Stallman do a very important job, but personally I don't get too hung up about proprietary software. I try and avoid anything with really blatant vendor lock-in and avoid proprietary file formats wherever possible, but I don't mind using non-Free drivers or plugins. I've always stood more on the BSD side of the fence, but I can see the case for GPL.