I'm a switcher

That’s right. I’ve switched.

For years, I’ve been a Red Hat Linux user. OK, not just for years, but since the release of Red Hat 4.2 almost a decade ago (I was a slackware user before that). I’ll be the first to admit that it was not for purely ideological reasons that I used Red Hat: I used it (and it’s red-headed step-child Fedora) mostly because it was The Standard Distro (c.f. the standard text editor). It had more support, both commercial and otherwise, than any other Linux distribution out there.

Every year I would try out some other Linux distribution: Sebian, Suse, Mandrake, Gentoo, Knoppix, etc. But none of them were as useful to me as Red Hat and Fedora. For years Red Hat has put together and maintained simply the best balance of modern, well-tested, supported software to ever grace an operating system. And so it was that I found myself greatly anticipating the release of Red Hat’s latest magnum opus: Fedora Core 6.

I have to admit that when I installed it on my workstation yesterday, I was slightly dissappointed. It really looked and felt a lot like the Fedora Core 5 that it was replacing. But I told myself that was to be expected: there was a lot of new software under the hood, and I shouldn’t overly concern myself with appearances. I guess what was really bothering me, though, was that I had installed Ubuntu Linux on my laptop (just to try it out), and Ubuntu presented a much more polished user experience. Ubuntu had polished out all the rough edges of the GNOME desktop and had managed to make all the included software work well together and look like it belonged together. I guess I was expecting Fedora to follow suit, but truth be told, I was willing to live without it.

The one thing I wasn’t willing to live without, though, was Firefox 2.

Fedora Core 6 comes with Firefox, of course, but it’s Firefox 1.5. I (naturally) assumed that Firefox 2 simply wasn’t ready by the time that the release was frozen, and that Fedora would naturally include the latest Firefox in an update to their operating system. It turns out that I was wrong.

It turns out that the developers responsible for Firefox in Fedora don’t think Firefox 2 is worth including, mostly because:

1. the new Firefox contains new anti-phishing technology that isn’t perfect
2. the new Firefox isn’t 100% backwards compatible with third-party add-ons for the old Firefox
3. the new Firefox has better support for web standards than the old Firefox
4. one guy reports that the new Firefox crashed on him once

Clearly, #1 is better than nothing, #2 is to be expected from new software, #3 is actually a good thing, and #4 is basically a case of a guy who needs to replace his bad RAM. But the real problem is that the Fedora developer is basically being a curmudgeon, and is getting away with inflicting it on the entire Fedora user base.

Certainly there are workarounds to this situation in Fedora: I could manually install a separate version of Firefox and ignore the one that comes with the operating system. But that leads to headaches of it’s own, and I use a linux distribution (rather than Linux From Scratch) to avoid exactly those headaches. And you see, I had this nice new shiny CD of Ubuntu Linux just sitting there, calling out to me…

So that was that. I’m now an Ubuntu user, and I don’t miss Fedora at all. Sure, the differences in package management will take a while to get used to, but after that it’s just plain GNU/Linux under the hood. Oh yeah, and I get a prettier and better integrated desktop user experience out of it, too, and Firefox 2 is included in the deal. And you’ve got to admit that from a feel-good perspective, the Debian-based Ubuntu has a much more cuddly mission than the ever-more-corporate Red Hat.

Some of you might think I’m a little late to the Ubuntu boat. Ubuntu was, like, so hot last year. But I’ll counter that I waited just the right amount of time: Fedora suited my needs perfectly up until now, and it’s taken Ubuntu this long to build up a community as large and supportive as the one Red Hat had built around it’s distribution.

The water’s perfect over here in Ubuntu-world, so jump on in.