Ubuntu eats it, Debian makes it worse, and Fedora saves the day.

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.