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Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

I suppose it's time to switch to Fedora, now, even though I've been holding out for as long as humanly possible.

This just pushes me over the edge.

I'm much the opposite: I keep giving Ubuntu a shot, only to find myself disappointed by GNOME, Unity, and the other usual suspects of the DE world. With no need for Unity & Friends, I just use stock Debian or Crunchbang.

I'm rooting for Canonical to do well with this so that I might finally be able to switch to using Ubuntu in order to get a well-supported, well-integrated, targeted-by-most, "Fast and Fluid" Desktop Environment. Up until now I still hide away in a corner with my annoying-to-maintain (but certainly "Fast and Fluid") Openbox environment.

I do agree with you on the well-supported and well-integrated part. Ubuntu has the polish and ease of use of OS X with the great hardware support of (nearly) Windows, with the solidity of a steadfast GNU/Linux foundation. But whenever I hear about a new development in the Canonical world, it's always about something that appeases consumers rather than power users (which Ubuntu has been targeted at). For developers who constantly need to dive down into the OS, something like Sabayon or Fedora seems to fit better with their endless modularity. Besides, it would be nice to try a non-Debian distribution for a change.

As a power user, I don't really feel I have particular unfilled needs in any Linux environment. Most of what I need, development-wise, I already have. All that requires is a shell and the ability to configure my apt sources. That said, I don't do much OS-level anything. For that, you will probably always need a distro that assumes less about your graphical environment.

What I do miss from other OSes/environments is that sense of a tighter integration. I spent many years not missing it, having originally gotten into GNU/Linux by cobbling together my own crummy environment in Gentoo (on which Sabayon is based).

It wasn't really until I first tried Windows 7 a few years back that I realized that if I actually wanted to use the latest this-or-that application in a seamless (dare I say enjoyable?) manner I needed to stop clinging to my obscure WMs.

And yet, to this day, I'm actually still clinging.

Why not Debian?

Debian stable tends to be too stable for my tastes; Fedora is much more bleeding edge. It's just a matter of preference, really.

If it's fresh packages you want, surely you know there's more than just stable. Have you given Sid a try? I've been running it for years on my non-server machines, and I haven't had any more or less problems with it than other bleeding edge distros.

Debian testing is pretty great. I personally use a mix of testing, unstable, and experimental on my desktop, and a mix of stable and testing on my server.

Fedora? Bleeding edge? I've heard that Red Hat is what's holding a lot of people back in the Python world, because their Python version is so ancient.

Fedora is bleeding edge, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not.

I have ran unstable for 10+ years. The only problems I have ever had were graphics related and required downgrading to an older version of an X11 library. Debian unstable has never put me in a position where I could have lost data.

+1; this was my thought as well. The problem, though, is that I can no longer say to people, "you should try Linux! Ubuntu is predictable, stable, and easy to use."

I don't know if Debian has a similarly friendly desktop distribution, but unless they do, I'll now point people to Linux Mint. Granted... I think this has been a better choice since Unity came into the big picture, not because it's bad, but because it's unfamiliar.

"I don't know if Debian has a similarly friendly desktop distribution"

Debian Wheezy (currently testing but which will be the stable release soonish) provides Gnome 3.4 desktop but with the options of xfce4, KDE and lxde. A recent install using defaults onto a low spec netbook was basically easy. See

http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/linux_debian-wheezy-instal...

When Wheezy goes stable there will be live images which can be installed from.

Thanks; I'm aware of Debian's release cycle, but am not entirely sure how "non-Linux-person-friendly" the stable release is. Which is my own fault, since I've settled for Ubuntu for so long.

It's great to hear it installs well on netbooks! I'm typing this on an Ubuntu Aspire One, though I always use OpenBox to replace whatever Ubuntu comes with since I'm comfortable with it. Will definitely check out Debian stable as an alternative (which is a bit funny coming from Ubuntu... an alternative to an alternative).

I'm a 'non-windows-admin' user and recently had to install Win7 and drivers on a thinkpad T60 for my sister as my usual CentOS/Ubuntu/Debian wasn't what she wanted. Took me a bit of time and some googling.

I think anyone that can reinstall Windows with drivers could manage a Debian install provided they check the wifi card (available firmware) and graphics drivers (not Optimus basically) first.

Gnome 3.4 with Gnome Shell is perhaps a bit heavy for an Atom based netbook although I find it usable.

Consider OpenSUSE. I've been distro-hopping for a while, and I've ended up delighted how well it works.

Fedora is now about as stable as Rawhide used to be.

I did that ages ago when the Unity mess happened. Fedora is actually really nice, and working perfectly on my machines.

Nothing has actually happened yet.

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