Something worth knowing about me: if my computer is working fine and doing everything I need it to do, I will still find a reason to spend days or even weeks trying to make it better.

I think it is a disease.

The rest of this entry will get a little technical, so here's the simple version: after about 36 hours of playing around I am now running Fedora 7. While the process was fun to the perverse extent that anything requiring highly technical understanding is fun, I admit to feeling some sympathy for the layman. I'm beginning to feel like Operating System technology peaked in the last two or three years and has been going downhill ever since.

Less than a year ago, I moved my desktop to Ubuntu. It is a Linux desktop, a free alternative to Windows, and I was very impressed. I was less impressed with my attempt to upgrade to version 6.10 ("Edgy"), so I dropped back to 6.06 ("Dapper") and I've been relatively happy ever since.

Yesterday I tried again. I wanted to accomplish two things: to take full advantage of my 64-bit processor, and to switch from Gnome to KDE. I downloaded Kubuntu 7.04 ("Feisty") for 64-bit processors and booted up the LiveCD; although it didn't recognize my RTL8180L wireless card (same problem I had with Edgy), the driver was included and easily loaded. I installed Feisty and everything seemed to be working fine, save an odd issue where my system would occasionally crash when I told it to shut down.

I ran the automatic updates, and a kernel update destroyed everything. It blacklisted my wireless card driver, it lost sight of my storage drives, it could no longer mount optical media, it no longer recognized my sound card, and the crash-on-shutdown problem actually got worse.

Now, I could go on booting into the older kernel, but who wants that kind of hassle? I could remove my wireless driver from the blacklist, but apparently it was blacklisted for bugging the kernel. I could use ndiswrapper to fake the wireless drivers, but my drivers were all on drives I couldn't access... ad infinitum.

What to do?

I had tried Fedora 6 back when I was choosing between distributions and I found out that Fedora 7 was recently released. The only problem I had with Fedora 6 was my wireless card, and since I was going to have to use ndiswrapper anyhow, I figured I'd give the hat another shot.

It turned out to be a lot of work. In order to install ndiswrapper, I first had to find this post and get the right files. Then I had to install ndiswrapper; actually getting the driver for my card was easy enough. That all worked, though to make it permanent I had to add three lines to my rc.sysinit file:

modprobe ndiswrapper
iwconfig wlan0 essid "MySSID" key xxx mode Managed
dhclient wlan0

With functioning internet, the rest was pretty easy. Linux really is a great OS if you have functioning internet; there are a lot of helpful people as well as great tutorials available, and online file repositories make finding software a snap. Once everything is working, Linux is a fabulous system, far superior to Windows in every way.

But the initial setup? I daresay it has actually gotten harder at least for me, in the last eight months. Which might be bad news for Linux, except that Windows Vista is generally worse! I'm not a programmer, so someone tell me what I'm missing: why do newer versions actually lose functionality? I understand that newer stuff is often less stable because it hasn't been as thoroughly tested, but could we at least refrain from breaking stuff that already works!?

I'm feeling some sympathy for the layperson, here. Dapper was the easiest operating system setup I have ever, ever had the pleasure of performing. I would put Windows XP SP2 at a distant second place in that race. In terms of stability, usability, all those post-install things, I'd say XP SP2 and Dapper are about even.

Right now I'm using Fedora 7 because, although it was almost as difficult to get up to speed as Vista, it offers me an acceptable middle ground. Note that all of the operating systems I've mentioned were installed on the same machine; naturally, different OS versions will bring varying levels of satisfaction depending on the hardware supported. But Windows XP SP2 and Dapper both natively support every piece of hardware I have--common hardware, more or less top-of-the-line as of January 2005--and their successors do not bring the same level of support.

I really liked Ubuntu and I hope to return to using it someday--either when I can afford hardware that is explicitly supported, or when they get their act back together with another LTS or something. Until then, I guess it's hats off to Fedora.