Affinity for Fedora

After using Fedora for 3 months now, I think I'm converted. I really appreciate the firewall settings, the ease of finding packages and the default start up settings.

Firewall settings

Initially frustrating, I've come to appreciate the default default firewall settings, basically everything is off by default, and installing services doesn't automatically open them up. This isn't something you couldn't do with Ubuntu, or any other linux distro, the tyranny of the default is real. Especially with me, I don't like to spend a lot of time on config. Now I've got profiles set up for the different wifi sources I connection. Its nice knowing that my ssh port isn't open to every wifi I connect to.

Default Startup Settings.

Basically I like not having every daemon I have installed to be running every time I boot up. Even if it doesn't use up a lot of resources, I really just don't like the clutter. By default Ubuntu enables start on boot. this is fine for servers, and for convenience, but I appreciate default off for my laptop.

Positive Initial Impression of Fedora

I've used off and on Ubuntu for about 7 years now. And I've been generally happy. However, recently I've found the behavior of Canonical and, more importantly, the lethargic pace of package updates to be off putting.

Really the behavior of Canonical is something I can live with, but it does give me reason to check out other distros. The slow pace of package updates is an actual problem. Yes I do want the newest stable release of Go and Eclipse. And yeah I do want to use the package manager with little or no configuration. Finally, don't like Unity. Didn't want to say it for a while, but yeah, the side bar is annoying, I don't like uninstalling Amazon, and the scopes don't work smoothly enough for me not to just search Wikipedia in chrome.

Consequently in the last year I've tried Arch, Suse, Mint, and finally Fedora.

Arch was high maintenance. It was satisfying setting up my system from such a low level. But, it was not fun debugging my setup every time I needed to install a new library. I experiment with coding, not with my system.I need my OS stable.

Mint is alright. But I've using a Debian based distro for a while wanted to try something different.

Suse was frustrating.

Fedora is pretty good

I installed on my laptop and everything worked right away. This seems to be common for modern linux distros (except arch), but I figure its worth mentioning that I didn't have to spend an hour installing crap after install like I did in 2007.

Fonts look ok. Not quit as sharp as Ubuntu, but definitely way better than Suse after install. Seriously that was basically unreadable.

After installing oh my zsh! installing packages with yum is just as easy as with apt-get. This is another place where Suse didn't cut it. I end up installing a lot libraries that I might not know the name of before hand and this is a big deal, saves me a half a minute here and there.

Package availability is also gigantic. Most projects that offer linux binaries offer Debian and RPM. Other distros (Suse) use .rpm, but I think most developers have Fedora/RedHat in mind when they

Conclusion

Between font readability, the ease of installing (and availability) the packages, and a jingoistic desire to use 'Merican software, Fedora is a winner. I think I'm going to stick with that for a while. At least until SteamOS hits it's stride.

Update

Yum and service don't seem to be tab completing. Annoying. Will have have to see if I can't figure that out.

Mandate! Man Date?

> man date

Arch Linux Is awesome (even when not using Arch)

High Five Arch! That is a dope ass wiki and community.

I dabbled in Arch Linux for a month or so. Definitely a learning experience. Installing the os from what seemed like scratch was a learning experience ( I know a lot more than I wanted to).

However the best thing about Arch was the community and the documentation. For those that haven't had the pleasure. Arch has an awesome wiki. There are articles on how to install just about everything: from RVM to Starcraft 2. Obviously this information is focused on Arch, but often the detail is fine grained and useful on other distributions.

It isn't the first place I go to figure out how to find out how to configure this or that service on an Ubuntu server, but if at first I don't succeed I'll search again on the Arch wiki.

Raring Ringtail Review.

I've been using Ubuntu on and off since 2007. It's consistently been my favorite operating system, and pretty much got me through college. Ubuntu has a lot going for it right now. Along with its (relative) popularity on the desktop is pushing into the mobile environment, a prospect I'm really excited about.


So yeah here's what I think about Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.


Unity

Lots of people don't like Unity. I'm actually a pretty big fan of it. It easy to open whatever program you want, just hit super and start typing. And lenses are really cool, just hit super and start  Its a smoother experience than Gnome or KDE. The only desktop environment I really prefer is LXDE, and thats for performance reasons.

Performance for Unity use to be a serious issue. I'm running a 3 year old Dell that was $300 when I got it, with a three year old $150 GPU. When Unity 3D came out my desktop couldn't handle it, hence my love of LXDE. This turned me off of Ubuntu for a couple of versions. But the 13.0

Packages

In general the status of supported packages is good. Go is at 1.0.3, and Node is at 0.10.0. These two in particular have been frustrating recently. Using ruby is still not as straightforward as I would like. Installing through apt-get requires gems to be installed with admin credentials, not cool bro. However I don't think this is really a knock, since I prefer to install through RVM regardless of the operating system.

Games



The real reason I still have a windows partition hanging around, games. I'm a big fan of the Total War series, and to a lesser extent Starcraft 2. I've been able to get Starcraft, but total war series crash pretty hard.

However, there are some positive developments on this front Steam has a couple hundred games for Linux. Some of them are actually pretty cool. Unfortunately for me, none of the strategy games are that compelling, they are mostly tower defence, do not like.

I've also heard that Unity (not the desktop environment) is raising money to port their application to Linux. That would be pretty sweet.

Chrome

As far as browsers go Chrome is the shit. I can't remember the last time I ran into someone in my friend circle wasn't using chrome. How does it work on Ubuntu? Well not so great. Facebook locks up all the time. Trying to run flash player on it is a disaster. I would imagine that Google would continue to improve the Linux platform. And Chromium appears to work better, but I think I'm going to be sticking to Firefox.

Conclusion

Ubuntu is a dope OS. Unity works better than ever before. A lot of the packages I use are now supported at a reasonable level. Games are promising.

I know games and Chrome are a bit outside the scope of Ubuntu as an OS, but what use is an OS if it doesn't support applications you want to use. 13.04 is an improvement over previous version, and I'm excited about the future of the project.