Fedora 8 to Hardy to Fedora 9 to Hardy again!

I used Fedora 6 then Fedora 7 then Fedora 8! And I awaited for Fedora 9. I had few problems with Fedora, it had a bug with Java, it didn’t work! Fedora 8 did not have a driver for my XEROX Phaser 3117 printer. All else was good for me. My work revolves around Python, PyGTK, GTK+, C++ etc. So, there was no problem for me. It was great. But I looked forward to Fedora 9, as it should have good support for my printer, Java etc. etc.

Then Canonical generously sent me a Hardy(Ubuntu 8.04) CD. I tried that our, and saw that it supports my printer and Java also. “Great”, I thought, I switched to Ubuntu for temporarily, while waiting for Fedora 9. Ubuntu has everything under control! But the lack of the root account was a bit of a trouble, but I soon got used to it. I enabled 3D Hardware rendering by installing the driver from ATI. And it was going great! I installed softwares I needed for my work, like Komodo Edit.

Then I got my hands on Fedora 9. Last week, I was really excited, that I had the new Fedora! I installed it, and I was disappointed. The distro felt incomplete. It didn’t have a good proprietary driver for my graphics card. It had bits of bugs. It was really not better than Ubuntu as I thought it would be. I didn’t even tried out Java on that distro.

I finally realised the difference between Ubuntu and Fedora. I always thought, that Fedora was no less than Ubuntu. I really could not understand why everyone keep saying that Ubuntu is better and popular than Fedora. Hey, Fedora! Don’t take me otherwise, there is no offence! It is just that one month using Ubuntu, and when I went back to Fedora, it really didn’t feel right! Fedora 8 was far more stable, robust! But Fedora 9 is not that good I think. Please don’t mind Fedora! I am still a big fan of Fedora as I am of Ubuntu! I would gladly use Fedora 8, only if it had a bit better out of the box hardware support.

Then, with sad heart I went back to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. I am blogging from that right now. I have already installed what I need, mp4 support, so that I can listen to Tiesto podcasts from Radio 538, I installed mp3 support for music, ATI Fire GL driver, gnuplot etc. etc. And for my works, I am using Komodo Edit, and NetBeans (the most sexiest IDE). Life is fun again, but I can see the unused Fedora 9 DVD lying on the table.