Here We Go Again – Now Running Fedora

I installed Debian Jessie a while back because I was totally sick of Ubuntu and it’s every-upgrade-breaks-stuff. I was sick of video card problems mostly. It would never save my screen setup. And it started corrupting my wallpaper after waking up from sleep. Annoying.

So I installed Debian and everything was working well. I did run into a few video card problems mainly with full screen videos (YouTube, Netflix, Hulu). This is my TV as well as my computer.

So I switched to Gnome-Wayland and that fixed it right up. The problems were gone for the most part. Fonts were a bit weird but I could live with them.

So I was working away yesterday and then suddenly out of the blue my screen locks up. After fooling with it for a bit I found that it’s my OS that’s locked up. And I had a bunch of work that wasn’t committed yet.

So I hard boot the system thinking that everything will come back up and I can start working again. Nope. I would get the GDM log in but I could not log in. It would act like it was then it would just return back to the GDM. I did no updates or anything. This was totally out of the blue.

So I try switching back to Gnome on X11. Nope. Same thing. Would not work.

I’ve had it with Debian and its no-propitiatory-software BS. It was a pain to install Google Chrome so I could watch Netflix. So I’m done.

I download ARCH Linux to try. Boot off my USB drive and it boots to a shell prompt. No installer! What the.

Well while I’m here I’ll mount the main drive and back up some work to my backup drive. I do that then I go to the docs to figure out how to install this thing.

This is not an easy system to install. You basically have to do everything manually at the shell. I get a bootable system but no network. Another hour I have bootable and networking. Then I install Gnome and my tools. Then Google Chrome…. PITA. I’ve had it. Nope, do not like.

I just want a system that I can use to do my work and not have to mess with to make it work. And no, I don’t want to run Windows or Mac and be locked into their BS.

Back 15 years ago when I ran Linux it seems like it ran a lot better than it does today. I never had problems with updates or video cards. Everything just worked. But anyway…

I download Fedora 21 to try.

I haven’t liked RedHat distro since I switched back to Debian way back in 1996 or 97. RPM was horrible and always had dependency problems. Then they went all enterprise and corporate.

The install was beautiful! Even the boot screen was really nice. It was a little weird picking the install drive but the rest was fine. It was super fast too. Way faster than any other distro. I was up and running on a bootable system in no time. And it looked great.

After copying a bunch of stuff over until wee hours of the morning I finally noticed I had a bunch of updates to do. So I ran those and it actually improved the system.

After doing the updates the font rendering was super nice and everything seems fine.

So, here I am on a Fedora system. So far so good. Two days later I have all my stuff installed and my work environment setup.

A few things got me messed up like my copied rbenv from my old system wasn’t compatible with the new. Had to recompile all my Rubies and gems. Only took a few hours to figure out that I had some ruby stuff breaking everything in my ~/bin dir. But for the most part everything is almost back to normal.

We will see in a few weeks if things stay good. I’ll let you know.