windows migrant: choosing linux distribution

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2011 at 18:36:04 +0000,
  Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Lastly, media friendliness: Fedora, again by choice, includes only
> software that can be described as free and open source, this excludes
> several things such as mp3 playback from the core system. There are
> easy solutions to this these days (just set up rpmfusion), but it does
> represent an extra level of difficulty (on the other hand, it isn't
> really difficult and might be a useful first exercise for somebody
> wanting to learn how things work). Ubuntu tends to include everything
> they think they can get away with.

Not not just Free software, but also unemcumbered by patents. The problem
with mp3 software is not that there isn't Free software that that can
encode/decode sound into the mp3 codec, but that the codec is patented
and patent owners do not permit free redistribution of code to use it.