Well, I’m back again to my beloved Fedora Linux. Fedora 18 Beta was not easy to install but is working fine after a few hours of tweaking. I started with LXDE as my default desktop environment. LXDE is lacking in some graphic configuration settings, but after logging into Gnome 3 I was able to configure things I could not configure in LXDE. A few days later I installed KDE and now consider it the easiest Linux desktop environment to configure as well as the prettiest with the most eye candy.

My KDE Desktop as it looks like on December 21, 2012.

Why I left Fedora 17

• Ibus for Japanese input was slow to start.
• Bluefish could not do Find and Replace. It would find what I entered but not replace them with what I wanted.

These have been fixed in Fedora 18!

Why I left Linux Mint Debian

• Wine and Windows applications in Wine loaded exceedingly slow, maybe 5 seconds or more. Wine and Windows applications in Wine in Fedora loads much faster, less than a second! I only run a couple Windows programs with Wine. I need these programs because there is no comparable Linux application for them.
• PulseAudio Server seemed to be buggy. Music and sounds would always start scratchy.

I wasn’t able to install Fedora 18 beta from a DVD, The installation ended in error message of, “Error checking storage configuration.” I had to do a clean install of Fedora 17 and then up upgrade from the command line:

su -c 'yum update yum'
su -c 'yum clean all'
su -c ‘rpm –import https://fedoraproject.org/static/DE7F38BD.txt
su -c 'yum --releasever=18 --disableplugin=presto distro-sync'

Note: If you use RPMFusion, you should also import its key for Fedora 18 before you upgrade or you will end up with an error message.

Preferred Desktop Environment

I switched to the KDE Desktop from Dec. 13 and like it better than ever. I think KDE is the easiest of all the desktop environments to tweak. Apparently Linus Torvalds agrees with me because he too switched to KDE from XFCE.

I never liked XFCE and used LXDE which I recommend for PCs with low resources.

I loved Gnome 2 but the Gnome developers thought they knew better than the users and gave us the hard to use Gnome 3.

Mate Desktop which is supposed to be a replacement for Gnome 2 still seems buggy. If any of you Mate Desktop users recommend it and had success in configuring it to what you like, please tell write your comments about it below. Thank you.

March 28 UPDATE: I’m sorry to say though it’s been weeks since Fedora 18 has been released, I’m still finding issues with it. Sometimes the default audio device is not found during startup. I’ve never had this problem with previous versions before. It occurs randomly. A reboot often fixes this problem. Once I had a yum update problem and it took me days to figure out how to fix it. KDE Desktop now locks up after startup so I am back to LXDE (which I like because it’s fast). So unless you are a geek and like to figure out technical problems, you might give Fedora 18 a pass. The latest Linux Mint (not the Debian spin) seems promising.

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