I’m thinking it’s almost time to end my love affair with Red Hat products. I’ve more or less used RedHat as my exclusive version of Linux for the last seven years. I had a brief (as in three week) foray with Mandrake and about a six month detention with Debian as my main operating systems before. I dumped Mandrake because, well it sucks. Any real Linux user will tell you that Mandrake is only one step above Linspire. I stopped using Debian back in early 2001 because I was tired of the snails pace of development and I wanted to be able to use some real software on my computer.
In general I’ve been happy with Red Hat products. I’ve been known to defend them on many occassions. I’ve found that for me they’re the right balance of up to date software and ease of use. Not to mention, it’s no problem finding other people who use the software. However, when Red Hat killed the desktop version and starting focusing solely on the enterprise version, things started to go bad. I initially switched to Fedora Core 1 when it came out last year. In general, I was pretty happy with it, but it was lacking a lot of the neato stuff that I really wanted, for example, Mplayer. But it was good enough, it had GNOME 2.4, which was the newest at the time. It allowed me to use RhythmBox with no difficulty. Initially, life was good.
However, as time went on, I found myself using a huge variety of other APT repositories to satisfy my software needs. My system became a kludge to say the absolute least. I knew that I’d never be able to do a clean upgrade again. Now, it comes to the point where I need to do a clean upgrade. I’m getting frustrated that my development environment lags so badly. I’d really like to try out Beagle and to upgrade my version of DevHelp but I cannot. Beagle just requires too much new stuff (Evolution Sharp?!) and DevHelp needs the 2.4 series of GTK. I went and compiled the 2.4 series this evening, and it seemed to work fine for the compile, but when I installed it, all my old GTK apps died. Things were not happy in Whoville.
So here is my radical concept. Switch distributions. I’ve been very happy up to this point with Ubuntu on my MythTV box. They’ve got the mad community support of Debian, with the release schedule of Fedora and the up-to-date software of Gentoo. However, my window is running short. They’ve got a release candidate out right now, but I’d rather have the complete thing which should be out soon. Once that shows up I should be happy. At that point I can back up my files and upgrade. Maybe next weekend if the release comes out before then. It needs to be one of these next two weekends to give me a chance to clean up before I leave for CSCW.