Fedora goes up to eleven
By Daniel Browning
July 23, 2009
I upgraded to Fedora Core 11 this week, up from 9. What really surprised me is how fast it is. I don’t recall ever having such a noticably faster and responsive desktop after a distro upgrade. Everything is more responsive and instantaneous. Even though FC9 didn’t seem particularly slow, I realize now that I had been spending time just waiting for the software to catch up. I don’t know where the credit is due. Could be anything from the kernel to XFCE to the apps. But I like it.
Normally, most SELinux issues occur when it is enabled. But after the upgrade I ran into one of the opposite variety: the gedit program threw an error on every file save. The 244605 and 477070 tickets might be the same issue I ran into. I worked around the problem by switching to ‘kate -u’.
I need at least four different text editors in order to enjoy using the computer. How could anyone stand the monotony of a single text editor all day? Right now I’m doing:
- gvim for detailed things
- vanilla vim for when gvim is too awesome.
- kate for vogon poetry
- jedit for when I get that certain IDE feeling (you know the one)
- emacs for inducing carpal tunnel syndrome
It’s also important to switch out text editors at regular intervals, such as when one of them breaks in a distro upgrade.
The first few minutes after booting up a fresh distro install are disorienting. Keyboard shortcuts and other customizations are so much a part of me that I can hardly function at all without them. Thank goodness that it’s only a matter of minutes before /home gets restored and everything is back to normal.
The policy I follow is to upgrade to every odd-numbered Fedora release. I don’t actually know if the even-numbered releases are worse or better, but based on my experience with Star Trek movies, I’m not going to take any chances. The majority of my coworkers run non-Fedora distros, even the ones that used to work at Red Hat. Some of them do RHEL, which I did a few times when I was waiting for an odd-numbered Fedora release.
Although I considered the B-tree FS with its “i-can’t-believe-it’s-not-btr” kernel option, ext4 won in the end. With the new policy of updating atime only once per day, I’m leaving it enabled. I couldn’t get the nvidia driver to load until I removed nouveau from initrd and downgraded to 173xx.
Overall, FC11 has been a great upgrade. Thanks to Free Software developers the world over.
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