Round about last week, I switched my desktop from Gentoo to Fedora. It took a few days to get everything the way I wanted. But it only took that long because I had lots of data to backup and (selectively) restore, and I only worked in the evenings. Fortunately, a “re-install” is way less painful than Windows, since all you really need to keep is your home directory. I just don’t know how Windows users live through it, especially without all their programs in a convenient package manager. I can happily say I have never re-formatted Windows for any reason (and that’s not because I don’t used it).

I guess there are a few reasons for the switch. I’d say it basically boils down to the following three:

  1. Gentoo wasn’t updating fast enough for things I wanted. I can’t say whether this is a general trend, but at least for packages I wanted, it was slow, and I could see that Fedora was getting those updates.
  2. My computer is getting older and packages are getting bigger. It’s not been too bad (except for god-awful C++ programs that use Boost), but I don’t want to work my system so hard as it gets older.
  3. And the most important: I got lazier. Not lazy enough to install Ubuntu though!

I guess I’ll see how well Fedora fairs. I’ve just got an audio bug or two to fix (already reported) and it should be good. Eventually, I should go see if my cx18 works, too.