I recently upgraded my home PC from Fedora 1 to Fedora 3. It used to be that this kind of upgrade was seamless, as the Red Hat Package Manager took care of most of the upgrade bits. This time, however, lots of pieces fell through the cracks.

The first clue was my inability to burn CDROMs. Whenever I tried, the system locks up, hard. Nice job, fellas. The second clue came today when I noticed my CUPS print daemon segfaults on startup. It’s like Fedora has implemented DRM on my machine: I can’t output anything on paper or disc!

On a separate, completely clean machine, I installed Fedora Core 4 this weekend. Or tried to, anyway. When it booted, something about the LVM partition completely blitzed the bootloader. This was the minimal install, too. Nothing fancy. I suppose the idea of testing software has gone out the window (or heck, I could blame the beta testers. Heh).

This might be a good time to check out Ubuntu a new distro that’s been making lots of waves. It’s Debian-based, which used to spell heartburn, but now seems to have gotten more user-friendly. The Ubuntu “live” cd (one that lets you test-drive Linux) that I’ve run looks impressive. What do I have to lose?