Goodbye Fedora 10 hello Ubuntu Jaunty.

After 7 years being a red-hat devotee I finally had it. Last Friday I was staring at my Fedora 8 PC in the basement running Wordpress, and another assortment of applications and wondering: How the hell I'm going to upgrade this guy to Fedora 10? If you are a Fedora user you know as well as I that inserting the Fedora 10 DVD, rebooting and select upgrade is not going to cut it. So many RPM's with some many dependencies are impossible to upgrade in one shot. I have lived the aches and pains of upgrading from Red Hat 6 all the way to Fedora 10 at work and I'm I now suffer from "upgrade fatigue". I'm tired of "moving forward" when my distribution doesn't offer me a clear path, method, procedure for it. I upgrade, libraries get messed up and I spend a week or so fixing them. I used to see as a a way the project maintainers forced us to find out about the features they are deprecating and how the new stuff works. That was then, when 2 or 3 RPM's where broken. Now the amount of packages makes the task of tracking all dependancies a full time job for. Hello Ubuntu. Last winter a friend of mine asked me to take Ubuntu around the block. My first impression: "Wimpy" A distro for the neophyte, for the hobbyist, not industrial grade material. But first impressions can be deceiving. The makers of Ubuntu understand what I'm talking about when you are trying to keep your operations flowing. Sure I will upgrade after a year or so (bugs and fixes do pile up) but please, make it as painless as possible, just stay out of my way. Don't tell me that libcc-x minimum version is needed...I don't care. Create a discipline and become predictable. Red Hat understood it when the Fedora branch came to be. Except: Why the at-home single users have to suffer from the vagaries created by an army of distro developers giving us new stuff by the truckloads every few months? Every single time I had to upgrade Fedora I ended installing it clean and moving one-by-one my settings and apps to the new environment. That was the only way to assure the new stuff had priority over the upgrade not touching my old settings and apps. WIth Ubuntu is a different story. Ubuntu's Synaptic Package Manager not only offers a single point of entry for the extensive package universes, but also offers means to perform a complete OS upgrade without the need of burning DVD's or downloading ISO's. Also Ubuntu separates the updates in categories (Security, Bug patches and just new stuff) That way you can decide what not to upgrade. I was running Ubuntu Intrepid on my laptop some weeks ago and suddenly the System's Updater program prompt me? Do you wish to upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty? I paused for moment thinking: No way Jose! This distro is just going to upgrade my whole OS with a push of a button? Can you imagine upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 by pushing a button? No disks no EULA's no registration just push the damn button. I'm talking the whole OS. From the kernel up, in one shot. And I did. In 20 minutes I was upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. I turned to my other PC running Fedora 10 and thought: "You poor thing! It's time for you to go" That being said there are things I used to run in Fedora that won't run in Ubuntu. For example my Logitech Quickcam ran flawlessly Camstream with Fedora 10. In Ubuntu Camstream crashes. In Fedora 10 I ran apache okay and in Ubuntu they have apache2 that for some freaking reason when I change the listening port from port 80 to port 8080 apache no longer finds my root directories or files. It runs though, it just says "File not Found" when trying to access any webpage in /var/www Ubuntu doesn't carry the game Urbanterror, Fedora does. What gives? Other debian's quirks are more related to me not being familiar with the distro. Like choosing pico as default editor. Screw Pico ! Give me vim. Also when I run vim my history editing history is kept but not the "last line" when I reopen the file. This little quirks are annoying but not a show stopper. So move over Fedora and say hello to Ubuntu. For those looking for Linux distro with a heartbeat, try Ubuntu.