Hello, old boy.
Last week, and the week before I think, I went kind of on a quest to find a new distribution, as I am a bit tired of the short release cycle of Fedora. I was hoping to come across a rolling release that works out-of-the-box and is not bloated, but that proved to be futile.
I gladly admit to be a bit lazy when I decline to offer to try Arch Linux, but I completely disagree that makes me less of a geek. As I have, most likely, expressed in ad nauseum; all I want is to install the OS and have it work out-of-the-box, and tweak it later if I need to. I feel I have reached that period in my life where I know what I want and I have no time to spend tinkering 24/7 like I did as a teenager.
As Aurora OS is starting to look more like vaporware I have kind of put that distribution on hold for now. So I decided to give sidux a go, as I can not be bothered waiting for Debian 6 to be released either.
sidux is a good rolling release that works (at least for me) out-of-the-box, but I am not a big fan of Xfce and it had far too many apps installed I had no use for.
Keep in mind, I know what I want, so seeing 10+ apps installed that I do not need annoys me.
As I prefer GNOME I thought I would give openSUSE a go, just to mix it up, but for some odd reason the fonts was just awful. I tried everything from Sans to Arial to Droid; no matter what I tried it was just ugly.
While I was trying out different Linux distributions I discovered one of the issues was my folder structure; it just made it a right pain in the arse to keep track of. I also learned that Grsync isn’t as reliable as I thought.
After spending almost a day restructuring my home folder I swallowed my pride and re-installed Fedora.
The install of Fedora I have at the moment is probably the best I have ever done, so far. It has only the software I need and want and thanks to my new backup scheme it was a breeze to restore and make new backups.
I use the LiveCD, so it is very easy to create a very minimalistic install.
As I have probably said before, and have to say again, the only Linux distribution I can say I really enjoy using is Fedora. It might be that it plays well with my Eee PC, but it is also the only one that is easy to strip down the almost a minimum.
It might be because I am mostly familiar with RHL and Fedora, but I honestly find Fedora a lot user-friendly than Ubuntu and openSUSE. Those who ask me to help them switch to Linux will end up using Fedora.
Note: I will later write a longer article why Linux actually sucks and is not ready for the desktop.
