I moved on to Fedora
It happened. After years of Debian and Ubuntu I changed my personal laptop’s Linux distribution to Fedora.
Why I changed to Fedora
- GNOME 3! GNOME 3′s integration in Fedora 15 (beta) was the best around, in my humble opinion. The Ubuntu + GNOME 3 ppa wasn’t a satisfying solution;
- I needed the challenge. For sure that I can still learn with a debian based system but I have much more to learn with a rpm based system at the moment;
- Fedora package upstream;
- It wasn’t because Ubuntu is a bad Linux distribution. I still think it’s great, I still use it on my work laptop and I will still advise people to use it.
Two days have passed since I changed to Fedora and I can say that yum doesn’t let me miss apt-get. It seams like a very complete and robust package manager.
In Ubuntu things were kind of automatic, I knew which files I had to tweak after each install, how to add repositories, etc.
Things I usually do after a fresh install:
- Update the system;
- Install the usual apps;
- Tweak the system to my needs.
Here’s a detailed guide of what I did in Fedora, might come in handy for some other newb like me:
- System update using Software Update (Apps, System Tools in GNOME Shell);
- Install extra repositories (Free and Nonfree);
- RPM Fusion
- Install the downloaded rpm’s (rpm -ivh FILE.rpm)
- I use Chromium (Google Chrome) so I installed it next. Followed the guide available in the Fedora Project wiki;
- I also followed the guide available in the wiki to install Flash Player;
- The page has lots of info, so for you lazy guys on a x86_64 system, follow this link
- Installing the equivalent to ubuntu-restricted-extras package;
- I followed the info available in this page (it’s in Portuguese)
- Getting the fonts right. Specially in the browser.
- yum localinstall http://fedora.missingbox.co.nz/core-fonts.rpm –nogpgcheck
- yum install freetype-freeworld
- I also had to add to .fonts.conf (~/.fonts.conf) some lines. Because it’s a XML file, it’s easier for you to download it: .fonts.conf
- Installed all the software I normally use…
And that was all. Everything after was absolutely normal…