Two nights ago, I got sick of my trashed Gutsy installation, which had become bloated, slow, and a little glitchy. Yes — I can trash an Ubuntu installation beyond recognition in only four months.
Well, I’d been reading about Fedora 8, which had some shiny new features like built-in PulseAudio. I’d also generally got good vibes from the community about the distro. So, I decided I would reinstall with Fedora (amd64). I wiped my Ubuntu partition, and stuck Fedora in its place.
Well, my first experience with Fedora was the slow, and slightly ugly, bootup process. An out-of-the-box Fedora was even slower to boot up than my slow Gutsy system. Not to mention a partially text-mode boot experience (because Fedora uses an Xorg-based splash screen, which can only start late in the boot process, leaving lots of text on the screen until it gets to the stage where it can start X), and they didn’t even bother to put any form of splash on the shutdown process. Maybe that’s subtle, but it’s the subtle things that make me love Ubuntu so much.
Another issue that couldn’t be ignored was the lack of a network connection. Fedora does not support the RT2570 wireless USB chipset out of the box. So, I had to drag out a network cable to get some form of networking. Even after getting a network connection, downloading the development packages (gcc and the like), downloading SerialMonkey’s RT2570 driver, I still couldn’t get it to compile. For some reason, it couldn’t see the kernel headers I had installed.
I quite liked the fact that Fedora barely deviates from the default GNOME setup. If you choose the Clearlooks theme with the GNOME icon set, they even keep the original GNOME “foot” logo on the Applications menu — something that I believe Ubuntu should be doing for all themes except for its own Human theme. Things like the spatial file manager, and the default shutdown/logout menus are enabled by default. I believe that the spatial file manager, once you get used to it, is better than the browser-based view.
However, after only a few hours, I quickly became frustrated. Fedora didn’t have an in-built method for installing NVIDIA drivers. Also, I didn’t like many of its system administration utilities. I spent ages figuring out how to add our ISP’s Fedora mirror to the yum configuration, and was disappointed to find out that they didn’t mirror the development repository.
Later, I downloaded a netboot .iso of Ubuntu Hardy, and wiped Fedora clean. Maybe I’ll come back to Fedora later, but Ubuntu has everything I need, and I feel more comfortable using it.
P.S. Ubuntu Hardy has PulseAudio built-in!
