I recently switched from Ubuntu to Fedora 11 after getting fed up with some of Ubuntu’s annoyances. I have been disappointed with the direction that Ubuntu seems to be heading. They seen to be trying harder to copy Microsoft. One of those annoyances are that Jaunty automatically opens the update manager every morning. Yes I like to keep it up to date, but its my decision when to update. At least they don’t reboot automatically like Vista.

So on to Fedora. Fedora 11 is more up to date which is pretty cool. Having the latest version (Firefox 3.5), dosbox and other packages is impressive. But being up to date had its disadvantages. Such as The ATI proprietary driver for Linux does not work on the later versions of the kernel, so their is no 3D acceleration supported at all. Which made me miss compiz a lot. Its just frustrating to have an expensive card that doesnt work at all. Which makes me think that I will probably go with Nvidia next time, they seem to have better support for most programs as well as drivers. And Fedora conveniently doesnt have a failsafe mode which made reverting back to the old driver entertaining. And the sound seems to pop and click sometimes, which I find extremely irritating. But Fedora’s not all bad for sure. The color scheme is better. Down with brown! I also like that it comes with a good handful of desktop wallpapers. A little thing but I think it makes it feel more customizable. The package manager is kind of interesting. The search and layout in my opinion is quite bad. Its kind of hard to find the packages that you want. But the fact that they seem to spread out programs into more packages if necessary is more ideal then the Debian setup. Like the fact that on Debian you can not remove cheese or evolution because their tied to gnome desktop is a horrible idea. Albeit its gnome’s idea not Debian. But still in Fedora it is not a problem. There is just a package that has the nautilus plugin for evolution which is safe to remove. And presto you can remove Evolution. But once again there are some issues. It would take a lot more work then Ubuntu or Debian to get all my programing utilities and libraries set up. For instance ruby shoes doesnt seem to work on Fedora 11. Which is a big problem for me because I’m doing some development with it. There’s probably a way to fix it, I just didnt want to mess with the symbolic link problems.

So I returned to Ubuntu and… sometimes it seems to be running slow, maybe that was because I was transferring 30 gigabytes between hd partitions but still with my computer I treat slowness, and unresponsiveness as a bug. And it still has that full screen compiz lag bug. Darn Ati. But there will be a new release soon. So hopefully it will be better.

So all in all I’m a little disappointed at the state of Linux on the desktop. It seems worse then it was 6 months ago. The reliance on Mono, etc…