I got a PC laptop for work with… Windows. Decided to install a Linux on it, and decided to give a look at current distributions. At the moment I was looking for a non-newbie system but with some basic configuration issues automated. For example, I desesperate when I need to configure a wireless manually. I think that is a task that should be easy to perform and not consume much time.
My first option was OpenSuse. I knew Suse for a long time and never tried it for being commercial. Now this was the chance to look and check what they have been doing. First, the installation wizard is really good. Not just good aspect, but also functional. It detects everything and reports the detections to the user. That is great. Also, when installing a boot loader, if it fails, it tries to help the user to correct the configuration and try to install it again.
Also, it lets you to choose between installing a KDE or Gnome based desktop. Also, a XFCE option is there. That is great. I love XFCE. Probably this choice was the reason I did not like OpenSuse, but who knows. So, when booting, the X Login Manager is based on TWM, that sucks. But that is not relevant. Login worked correctly, but when configuring the wireless device, it couldn’t connect to the wireless network. I could not find why. It did not complain with the password. It did not complain about lack of signal (no idea about its power, btw). It just said it configured the network device, and exited the configuration tool. Tried a few minutes to find out what was going on with iwconfig and ifconfig, but decided to try a new distribution.
Next try was Fedora. I know lot of people using Fedora. It is not an old distribution, but given that they use a big base from RedHat, it should be somewhat stable. Booted the live-cd and used the installer available on it. That is good because it lets you use a linux system while you are installing other linux system. That is cool. The installer, itself, is equal to the first fedora installer (at least I did not find big differences). The windows are not well designed (widgets not correctly placed…), but it is enough for the installation task.
But that isn’t my complain. My complain is that, after half hour installing the system, anaconda crashed when installing the Grub bootloader. Instead of an error message I got a Python backtrace. And that sucks. First, because I hate Python. Second, because it crashed the installation, forcing me to restart the installation.
No, I will not retry fedora now, I think. I will download another linux version.
Hope I can find any interesting distro that is not Ubuntu (I have different complains about it… for a future post).