F10

So, I’ve been a user of Debian (and lately Ubuntu) since around 2001, with RedHat, Mandrake, and Slackware being in use before then. Debian was like a revelation: ‘apt’ is how package management should be! I still have my server running Debian stable, but I thought I’d try putting Fedora 10 on my laptop this go-round to see how it compares to Ubuntu. All the marketing hype about Ubuntu being mere aggregators of others’ hard work had something to do with that as well. Besides, yum has been around for years now so surely it is as good as apt by now.

Here are my thoughts: I still find yum a little clunky for a few things; maybe that’s just my expertise in apt speaking. LVM was the first thing to go — it wasn’t hard to do from the graphical installer. The much hailed boot graphics stuff only worked with vesafb for me since they dropped the modesetting code for Intel from the kernel. I had to overhaul the installkernel script to properly update grub and not bother with an initrd, since I hate them. Finally, all configuration seems to be HAL driven now, which just means putting more random undocumented crap into huge XML files in /etc to get your touchpad working. Lovely, I’m sure Ubuntu is busy adopting that mess. On the plus side, a nice looking gnome setup with reasonable defaults. On the whole, Fedora 10 is a solid release, though it will still take some time to get it configured to my liking. Perhaps by then I’ll give openSuse a spin.