Ubuntu… Linux for noobs, yet a pleasant Linux experience nonetheless. Friendly, happy to see you, it practically makes you coffee in the morning. And for some reason, it always craps out whenever a new ‘version’ is about to come out. As I read in another article recently, I’m not in Fanboy mode, I’m in User mode, and I need this laptop to ‘just work’. Every time a new version of Ubuntu rears its head (11.10 being the upcoming beastie) I go through my updates and something inevitably buys the farm. Painful? Yeah, kinda. It’s definitely a headache.
That being said, Ubuntu does provide one of the fastest, easiest, most painless entries into the world of Linux that I’ve experienced. I’m impressed by it. But I digress.
So an hour into the rubbing my ears and reminding myself that I really do *not* want to kick my laptop into component parts, I’m wondering why my hitherto oh-so-stable Ubuntu installation is now throwing up all kinds of errors, windows, and irritating artifacts. Hours of research later, and I say screw it, I’m putting another distro on. I’m a fan of apt and there’s an awful lot of support out there for it, so I decide to give Debian a try. Ubuntu’s based on Debian, Debian’s been around since the dawn of man, and it’s all good. Right? Nope. Debian effing sucks. It has the old-ass POS gnome interface, nothing seems to work well on that either, and I was getting more and more frustrated. I figured I could just change the interface to the new Gnome 3 (my favorite environment these days, though Unity does a great job too) and voila, I’d hammer out the details later.
But no, apparently I can’t do that. Debian doesn’t support Gnome 3. It’s much too awesome.
Okay, fair enough. I give up on all these newfangled whateversauces and pull out my fancy Fedora 15 live disk, install it in like, 5 minutes, and I’m up and running again. Yum is pretty much the same as apt, rpms just work, the shell is magical (though that’s nothing specific to Fedora), and Gnome 3 makes my heart skip beats. I even have GIMP 2.7 running in single-window mode.
I hate all this distro-hopping. Back to work.
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