haggholm | Whither my Linux? Or, now Ubuntu and Fedora have cheesed me off, where do I go next? (Reply)

I’m feeling oddly adrift in my Linux taste, these days. I wasn’t a Linux evangelist before, mind, but I would like to be able to answer with a recommendation if somebody asked me what distribution I think they should run. For a long time I would have confidently replied Ubuntu!, but right now I should be unable to do so unless their æsthetic sense differed radically from mine, for starters. I started this year an Ubuntu user. Right now I’m a slightly disgruntled Fedora user in search of something better.

Ubuntu

My experience with Ubuntu started bright and turned better with the years. It was always intended to be easy, friendly, and ready out of the box. There was a time when I was too attached to the tweaking of my Gentoo days to appreciate it, but once I started worrying about two or three computers rather than just one desktop, Gentoo felt like too much work, and Ubuntu’s satisfactory out-of-the-box experience was a relief. Installing it is a snap: Always works, never causes trouble. Upgrades are smooth. Release updates were a bit of a jar from the rolling schedule of Gentoo, but they always went without a hitch, or at most very minor hitches. (Except when I chose to upgrade to beta versions, but if I choose a beta version I know I’m inviting potential trouble!)

The problem is that while Ubuntu has an exquisitely engineered distribution, what it actually distributes is less satisfying to me of late. In part I get annoyed by the tension between Ubuntu and the FOSS community—all the controversies over contributor agreements, playing poorly with upstream, demanding that other projects adhere to their schedules, and apparently picking their software stack based on political desire for control:

Since both init and Xorg are flexible enough to provide the sorts of improvements that Shuttleworth advocates, the suspicion is that such decisions are not technical, so much as political. That is, what concerns Ubuntu/ Canonical is not the technical merits of the applications, but its ability to dominate the projects that dominate its software stack.

The launch of Ubuntu One sort of cemented my generally suspicious attitude toward Canonical. Still, while I might not be wholeheartedly enthused by the company, the product still seemed good.

Until they launched Unity with no good fallback or alternative and in a fit of anger and disgust I left Ubuntu behind. People can claim all they like that it’s similar to GNOME 3. To me GNOME 3 is different than its predecessor, but looks sleek and polished and looks good on high resolution monitors. Unity expressly comes from a netbook project and a harebrained attempt to shove multimonitor, widescreen setups into a low-res netbook mold. Additionally, it looks like the OS X dock interface (which I heartily dislike), but redesigned and styled by ignoramuses armed with crayons rather than the expert UI designers at Apple.

Gentoo

For a brief while I played around with Gentoo again. I like it. I genuinely enjoy the fiddling I have to do to get a Gentoo system up and running, and I really don’t think there’s so much of it that it’s a serious burden. The emotional appeal of a system that I have customised is great; it’s the comfort of a carpenter whose tools have worn down by pressure and friction to fit his hand alone—I don’t pretend that my managing CFLAGS measurably helps performance for most applications, and even USE flags, though definitely useful, don’t affect me that much. But it’s comfortable and pleasing, as someone who cares about his tools. It’s also pleasantly familiar, as the distro on which I cut my teeth as a regular and moderately competent Linux user.

The problem is chiefly just that while I’m happy, nay, delighted to manage a Gentoo system, I’m not half as happy to manage three of them, and between work desktop, home desktop, and laptop, I would be. That’s too much repetitive work; too much time.

Minor problems include never quite being entirely satisfied either with stable (which is too far behind!) or unstable (which, though rarely, sometimes means a bunch of fudging and masking and version-specific flag management); and at the time when I last tried it, the fact that I was really kind of curious about GNOME 3 and Gentoo had no reasonable way of checking it out—it was faster to try Fedora.

So right now I’m not using Gentoo, but as always when I’m not using Gentoo, I sort of wish I were.

Fedora

My experience with Fedora is mixed. Once I get a Fedora system setup and running, I have no complaints. It’s solid and stable and easy to manage and keep updated, as I expect from a Linux system. They stay up to date with software versions and follow upstream rather than going off on silly, Ubuntu-esque digressions, both of which I appreciate. Running it, then, is a pleasure.

But setting up Fedora is another matter. I’ve done it a few times this year, and while it’s fine when it just works, it—wait, no, I don’t know what that’s like. I actually think setting up Gentoo is more straightforward: It’s a lot of work, but it bloody well works the way the guide tells you it will. Fedora is simple in theory, but never seems to work out of the box.

This is what I’m currently running because frustrating as setup can be, I only have to do it every six months or so at the most, and in between it’s pretty much sunshine. But ye gods! are those intermittent periods ever exasperating! Installing a release version of a distribution should not be this error prone, and the upgrades? Disgraceful.

It’s kind of the antithesis of my view of Ubuntu right now, really. If I could run an Ubuntu installer and end up with a Fedora setup, then I’d be happy. That’s not what happens, though. Instead, what I get when I try to install Fedora (I say try, but there is eventual success), is a series of tales of woe I place behind a cut for your comfort.

In the past couple of days, I’ve installed Fedora 16 on three computers: My work computer (migrating it from Ubuntu 11.04 by means of reformatting / and installing F16 from scratch, preserving my /home partition), my home desktop, and my home laptop (the latter two from Fedora 15). The experience involved

For my work computer:

The installation initially appeared to work—partitioning, formatting, copying files, and so on. This proved deceptive, because in the post-copying stage it declared that there were errors on the / filesystem. These did not occur from mkfs.ext4 alone, and the CD’s self-checksumming verified. I suppose it somehow managed to corrupt the base system image during the copy. Consistently, several times.
By downloading, burning, and installing a net install CD (more challenging now that I had no working computer at all), I was able to install F16. However, it wouldn’t boot into X. I don’t know why, only that it failed.
Rather than address the above, I decided to install the binary Nvidia driver from RPM Fusion to see if this would solve it (I was going to install that anyway). Then it failed because SELinux blocked parts of the driver. This, I admit, was documented in the third-party guide to the driver in the forums, and once resolved the system actually worked. Note, though, that to install the proprietary driver I had to enable a third-party repository and install several packages including custom SELinux policies, and consult a guide present only in a forum rather than on either official Fedora docs or on RPM Fusion’s website. (It’s a very good guide, mind; my issue is with its necessity and not its contents. For Nvidia drivers on Fedora, leigh123linux on the Fedora forums is your man, and no shadow on him.)

Next I decided to update my home desktop. Now of course I knew I was in for a ride, but I did this with less pressure in that I need a working computer at the office, but if my home desktop is not useful for a few days that’s no big deal; I can use my laptop (and sometimes I keep my desktop running Windows for days at a time, if I am in one of those rare phases where I play a game particularly frequently).

Many sources recommend fresh installs over distribution upgrades for Fedora. I find this inherently troubling.
There are two officially supported upgrade methods: By using an install CD, or a tool called PreUpgrade that will download an installer in the background and reboot into it when ready. This seemed fine to me. It was, except for the part where the installer (once finally downloaded) hung at the stage of inspecting storage media. This is a known issue with NTFS volumes present, I gather, as I have. So PreUpgrade doesn’t work.
There’s a guide to upgrading Fedora using yum, but users are cautioned that this is not officially supported, and it involves a series of yum commands and so on. However, on the bright side it actually worked.
I had the same Nvidia driver issues, but since I’d encountered them on my work computer I knew what to do.

At this point I was, although exasperated, pretty confident that I was in the clear for my laptop. I’d managed even a new install, despite all that the Fedora people could throw at me; and my non-essential desktop had taught me how to run an upgrade. And the laptop runs no proprietary video drivers, so there would be no SELinux problems!

The yum-based upgrade path basically worked, but by the end of it my wireless network wasn’t working, so I had trouble completing the last steps. Why did it take down the wifi, when the wired was never harmed? I don’t know. Minor problem since a reboot fixed it, and a network cable probably would have as well, but annoying all the same.
When I finished updating everything and restarted X, what do you suppose happens? Oh no! GNOME said. Something has gone wrong. I couldn’t find any indication in the X logs of what had gone wrong, but suspicions gnawed at my guts. Disabling SELinux enforcing solved the problem. Note: No proprietary drivers on my laptop. Yet apparently the upgrade process landed me with a GNOME environment that the OS didn’t trust to run.

Now, I’ll freely acknowledge that I’m a bit of an early adopter if I upgrade to the newest version the same week that it’s released, but I find all this very disappointing in what is supposed to be a release version, having gone through formal alpha, beta, and RC stages, with the final release even pushed back (I think twice) to resolve blockers. This load of issues, on three separate systems, is the result? I’m typing this up on a computer that is now finally running a perfectly beautiful GNOME 3 on Fedora 16, but it really shouldn’t take this much drama to get here. I’d excuse it if I were running Gentoo/unstable (excuse it, but be surprised to find it—the quality of Gentoo’s unstable branch would have to go downhill for that to happen).

Still, having tried the two biggest distributions (Ubuntu and Fedora) and found each wanting in its own way, I’m not sure where to turn next. Linux Mint? It is Ubuntu-based but seems less willfull and control-freaky, and the next version (due any day now) will ship with GNOME 3. Maybe that’s worth a try. openSUSE? Something else entirely?