Flirting with Fedora

23 Jun 2015

After many many years of using K/Ubuntu exclusively on all of my computers, I am flirting with Red Hat’s Fedora. K’s laptop is still running Kubuntu, but mine is not and I’m getting ready to rebuild a server with Fedora instead of Ubuntu. IIRC, I ran Fedora Core 1 briefly. I liked it alright. But there were several releases with show-stopper bugs and Ubuntu seemed to be moving from strength to strength at that time. I was tired of RPM-Hell, after many years of using RPM-based distros (Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake). Prior to using Ubuntu, I had never used a Debian distro.

Impetus for the Flirtation

Truthfully, I really like Ubuntu and I when I can buy a tablet with Ubuntu pre-installed I will probably pony up. I like a lot of what Ubuntu is doing and I continue to think 15.04 is the nicest Kubuntu release in a long time. It is SHARP.

Several months ago, my dependable Dell XPS 13 unexpectedly died. I nearly bought another one, because it is a terrific laptop. Instead, I did something crazy. I drove down to Best Buy and bought a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. Yeah. Crazy. Ubuntu never quite worked on it. Or rather, it never worked well and it required endless fiddling / configuration.

For example:

• Suspend never worked reliably.
• Touchpad support continued to be flakey.
• To get UEFI to work, I had to keep a Windows partition, which effectively wasted part of the Harddrive.
• KMail continues to live in the late 90’s.
• Thunderbird is a hot-mess.

But the real killer is that the Surface Pro 3 is a tablet/laptop hybrid. Kubuntu Touch did not survive to 15.04. Plasma desktop did, but not the tablet interface. I don’t know why. Unity 7 sucks on this thing and Unity 8 is still an unstable hot mess. Thus I found myself owning a tablet/laptop hybrid which I was forced to use as a laptop because I didn’t have a decent touch-oriented interface.

Temptation

Once, many years ago, I was a distro-hopper. Sad by true. I thought I had kicked the habit, but the Surface Pro 3 problems revived the old itch to try something new and Arch still seems like a lot of work. My fall came in three steps.

• I read more than one glowing review of Gnome 3.16, especially on Phoronix. I looked at some screenshots and I was impressed.
• Then I stumbled upon a Git repo, managed by some engineers at Intel, providing custom Fedora kernels for the Surface Pro 3.
• After testing Fedora on a USB key briefly, I copied my files to the network and wiped the drive. Have I returned to my distro-hoppinh ways?

With a little fiddling, I was able to delete the Windows partitions. AWESOME. Windows 10 looks interesting, but Windows 8 is a nightmare. The intel repo is everything I had hoped it would be. Shutting down is still a little flakey sometimes, but the custom kernel has solved most of my hardware problems.

Gnome 3 continues to evolve. To me, it doesn’t feel as smooth as Plasma 5. It just seems a little rough around the edges but there are some terrific ideas here. Gnome Shell isn’t as configurable as Plasma, but the extensions are cool, if a little hard for new users to discover/understand. Apps like Evolution and Rhythmbox, long staples of Gnome desktops, appear to be deprecated and don’t quite fit with the new Gnome HIG. Unfortunately, replacement apps like Geary and Gnome Music aren’t really feature-complete or stable (yet). I’m using Geary (I’ll make a donation later this week) but continue to use Rhythmbox. Geary is really a beautiful email client.

It is probably just another sign of my distro-hopping-relapse, but it is FUN to use another desktop. I still LOVE KDE. But Gnome is nice too. Unity 8? Dunno. I have my hopes. I don’t really care as long as I have decent tools and they let me use Emacs without too much fiddling. My biggest problem - I keep trying to start konsole, which isn’t installed. Gnome Software offers to install it for me. My fingers aren’t used to starting gnome-terminal from F-2. Obviously, a minor gripe which is really user-errror, not a problem with Gnome.

Will I Install this on K’s Latop?

Fedora is working. . . for me. But I don’t think I can install this on K’s laptop. She is going to continue to use KDE. Gnome 3.16 is beautiful, but very different. I think she would struggle with the dramatic change in workflow. Gnome Software is beautiful, but there are many applications missing from it’s catalog because of missing App Data.

I give Fedora 2 thumbs up for geeks. For everyone else, stick to Ubuntu, at least for now.