Is there a catharsis subforum I can post this to?

[oOarthurOo]

My first linux install was Slackware. And by install I mean I could print the install manual and burn the CD and mess up my computer with it. That was about it. Then I tried Debian Sarge and seeing the friendly red circle gave me hope for the future. But I couldn’t get it working. Mandriva and a few more I don’t remember followed. I think I got a desktop running on Suse. Then I tried the Warty Warthog, and I’ve been using Linux ever since. [/SIZE]

Brown town was easy. Everything was shiny and exciting. The forums seemed to me to be like the wild west. So much energy. It took me a little less than two years before I wiped the Dust from my eyes, and realised I was nothing more than an enthusiatic brown lemming being led over the cliff. Looking back it’s clear the experimentation was not so drastic then. Dr. Shuttleworth was just getting started, but Mr. Hyde was already there I suspect. After riding the introduction of Pulse before it was ready, Upstart before it was ready, I’d grown sick of being a part of his experiments. No more a guini pig would I be.[/SIZE]

I’d learned a thing or two, seen a thing or two, since starting. And I wasn’t ready to just throw that “knowledge” away. So Debian was a natural choice. I’ve been using Debian every since, about 6 years or so. Very happily, I might add. And yeah, there was some sadness, seeing the Brown Town I grew up in diverge from the rest of its bretheren. Community remains a popular word all over their website, but we all know they’re referring to Their community. All other communities must assign their rights to be a part of the Brown community now. [/SIZE]

Amazingly enough, the Brown Guini Pig community is still doing very well. It remains strong and vibramt, despite the more drastic scientific experiments being done on them: [/SIZE]

Experimentation Log:[/SIZE]
Day 9: The status tray is a bad idea – we’ve redone it.[/SIZE]
]Day 10: Here, try our netbook interface. Are you still using the gnome desktop? I’ll just move these Window buttons over here. You can change it back if you want, but we’re making other changes soon so you better not. [/SIZE]
Day 11: You know what, forget netbook interface, try Unity. Wow, that really sucked. Ok, let’s replace X and see how that goes. [/SIZE]

Unity. Others have already noted the uninentionally ironic name. I’ll just point out that what you’re left with when you remove it from the community is a commun. Some would say that sounds about right. [/SIZE]

Change is everywhere though, and can’t be avoided. Take a look at where gnome is heading. Gnome hired some UI mystics to transform the way we interact with the computer. I tried out the shell and realized I’m a fossil. For god’s sake, my first computer had Windows 3.0, I figure I should be able to adapt. Of course, I know of many Debianites still using the CLI for file management, but they talk about computers I’ve never heard of before. Adapting is hard I suppose. The gnome mystics promised me it would transform the my relationship with the desktop, and it has; I’m using KDE now instead of Gnome. I remember how people complained about 4.0. Still complain. I understand their pain much better now, but for a first glance I can say 4.5 looks good to my eyes. I have no memory of the 3. series or 4.0 incarnation. Probably for the best.[/SIZE]

And that’s really why I’m here. The point of this post, if there can be one aside from catharsis. I tried Debian’s KDE before coming here. It’s in need of some love, and somewhat out of date. I understand why. In preparation for a release they freeze development. It’s meant to be for a short time, but inevitably it turns into another ice-age. A one year freeze is pretty much normal I think. I don’t want them to change. I like it like that. I think it’s great. It’s not you baby, it’s me.[/SIZE]

And hey I’ve been here before. Apparently I joined shortly before 2009. I’m sure I’ve tried every release from 12 on. They’ve been great releases and I like what Fedora does for the Linux community. I like what Red Hat does. But I never had a reason to switch. Until now. Nothing against Fedora. I just was happy where I was. Past tense. [/SIZE]

I read on Planet Kde tha Fedora rolls a pretty good KDE release. What an understatement. So I installed F14. I guess I’m here to stay. Nothing is certain.[/SIZE]

My immediate desire is to figure out how how your repositories work. On Debian I added an experimental repo and pinned it at a lower priority so nothing got installed or updated from it unless specifically requested. I installed LibreOffice that way, and knew that as updates were released and migrated down, I’d begin tracking the more stable releases automatically. How I miss /etc/apt/preferences right now. [/SIZE]

Well, lunch break over. Back to work. As soon as I figure out how to install LibreOffice that is.[/SIZE]

[smr54]

There is a priorities plugin.

yum install yum-priorities-noarch

There is some explanation on the CentOS wiki. There are some caveats about it, though I've never had it affect me (I only use it, actually, on CentOS).

http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities

There is a reviews, rants and things that make you scream subforum--while it's not called catharsis, the idea may be the same.

[jpollard]

Yes there is. Scroll down and you will find:


Reviews, Rants & Things That Make You Scream

I think that is the forum you are looking for....

[leigh123linux]

Move to Reviews, Rants & Things That Make You Scream and edited (use normal fonts next time or face post deletion)

[oOarthurOo]

Thanks. It was a cut and paste job, from a Windows machine. Post deletion wouldn't be the end of the world.

Thanks for the tip on priorities plugin.

[DZ*]

I read on Planet Kde tha Fedora rolls a pretty good KDE release. What an understatement. So I installed F14. I guess I’m here to stay. Nothing is certain.

My KDE experience is nearly identical with Fedora and Ubuntu and I often forget which one I'm running until I right-click on the Desktop (no konsole launch option in Ubuntu).

[cl333r]

Back to work. As soon as I figure out how to install LibreOffice that is.

I just installed LibreOffice in Fedora, had to remove OpenOffice first. So far, at least the startup behavior (behavior, not time) is not so crappy as in OpenOffice.

Don't complain about change, the only thing that is constant is change. You're saying Ubuntu is moving to upstart but so is Fedora moving to systemd.. etc etc

I use Linux on a daily basis since 2007 and I think there's no such thing as "perfect or nearly perfect distro" since they all share same (gnome/kde/etc) code base which a priori has lots of bugs and (IMO) crappy decisions and most what a distro does is fix _some_ bugs and smooth out a _few_ rough corners. Period. All distros are bugged by bugs in pretty significant ways, even the "stable" debian.

There's also distro specific good & bad stuff - and that's the only big difference I see between distros.
I like Fedora because:
- it moved away from Mono (I applaud Red Hat for that!)
- it adopted Vala (so did Ubuntu later)
- it has D prog. lang support but I'll only start using it when/if D2 arrives in Fedora.
I use it currently because it doesn't feature the nasty bug from Ubuntu that makes my internet experience crappy and since Ubuntu 11.04 daily builds pretty much solved this bug I'll move back to Ubuntu.

I dislike in Fedora:
- slow, bureaucratic, verbose update/installation mechanism, it takes its time and issues such a lot of bafflegab that it looks like I'm launching a rocket into space.
- the add/remove software behaves the opposite way I expect it to, plus it's slow and has a bad GUI.
- I still have a glitchy desktop, the default Gnome applets randomly fail to load at startup (never happened with Ubuntu).

I'll move in April back to Ubuntu because:
- it doesn't require me to google and hope that I found the right answer to i.e. how to install my proprietary nvidia driver, and even the solutions found in google are pretty crappy, i.e. rpmfusion is often outdated an not quite clear and doesn't cover some cases and etc etc
- I just love ppa's, boy they're so simple and useful! And lots of ppa's are available.. that's a lot of fun, really, and they usually work very well.
- autologin etc etc is fixed in Ubuntu and I don't have to google around and use hit and miss solutions.

Yes, imo most of what we have in Linux we owe to Red Hat, but that's not enough to win over Ubuntu since normal (non-technical) users only care about end-user experience and ease of use.

I find Gnome still a wacky desktop, particularly Nautilus is the king of slowness (both startup and file listing), along with gedit's notoriously slow startup. The open/save dialog is distinctively crappy, will see what gnome3 offers. Evolution is slow as hell (Thunderbird is better but underdeveloped). OpenOffice is plain crap compared to Office 2007/2010 and normal users don't give a damn about file formats. There's quite a lot of rework to be done.