A rant from a grumpy old geek.

Last night I had a go at installing sidux on my Eee PC as I am growing tired of running a Linux distro that makes you have to reinstall every bloody sixth month!

I have grown used to YUM and RPM, but the release cycle is just killing me. I would most likely be fine with a yearly-ish release cycle, but every sixth month they tempt you with new bells and whistles. Ah yes, I know, I can skip a release, but that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? New and (hopefully) improved features, something you prefer not to miss out on, right?

I am honestly too lazy to try Arch. It sounds perfect, but I have no intentions, or time, to spend hours fiddling and hope it will work. As I have said so many times, I prefer to install, have everything working out-of-the-box and tweak the system later, if I need to. All I want is to be able to sit down, get online, check my email, listen to some music while I am writing. Is that too much to ask for?

The install I did last night was just a test, so I could get the feel of what I could expect. When I woke up today I just made a quick breakfast and started installing sidux, which only takes about five minutes, but it has been out for a while and being a (kind of) rolling release there were a lot of updates waiting for me.

The upgrade, removing unwanted programs, installing programs I needed and customizing the desktop went fine. I had planned to get  this out of the way in the morning, fix my cover letter and look for jobs. After upgrading and doing my first reboot it went pear-shaped from there.

First I thought sidux refused to work with me and decided to act up and make me hate yet another Linux distro. After almost an hour I found the source of my loss of hair and patience. The router was acting up and was, for some odd reason, refusing to let any computer connect. So I had to spend another hour or so fighting with that thing; getting all frustrated and angry.

When everything was fixed and the computers in the house was finally back online again, the day was gone.
On top of that— of course it had to be more —my backup was not complete. It wasn’t missing any files, but some of the files where old. Luckily it seems I haven’t lost any vital files, but it is still very frustrating.
I was using Grsync, and I would assume that should be a very reliable tool.

I have always had an interest for technology, but now and then I just hate it with a very strong passion. We want tour gadgets to be more and more functional, but at the cost of more headache it seems. I am not a programmer, but I still know that the more lines of code a program has, the more bugs it will and can contain.

Jokingly I wrote on Twitter earlier that I was contemplating to just get a pen, a moleskin notebook and an old school typewriter. Just use tools that has a simple function and will unlikely break on you or frustrate you as much as technology can.
Or I could go high-tech and get an iPad with the extra keyboard.

I hope sidux will be a breath of fresh air, but I just know that if I had the money I would actually get an Apple Air tomorrow  and be smiling.

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Comments
2 Responses to “A rant from a grumpy old geek.”
  1. Amit says:

    Hi, I think you should consider using Arch linux. I use Gentoo myself but theyre quite similar, the thing is every time they release a new version, I just have to upgrade it with a single command. I don’t have to re configure the whole system.

    • Dr. W says:

      I have honestly considered it for probably a year now [using Arch], but after reading the wiki I am a bit unsure if I can and are willing to invest so much time to get it running. It is also the thought in the back of my head that says: “What if you make a mistake and it doesn’t work, and you have to start all over again?”

      At the moment I am running sidux, and so far it is working. Sure, I have just used it for two days, but nothing has gone wrong, yet.
      It is also the thought that those who have created the OS knows better than me on how to pre-configure the OS for install. Like I wrote and tend to say, I prefer to install the OS and have every thing up and running out-of-the-box, then tweak the OS later, if I need to.

      More Linux distros should understand that a rolling release is the future.

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