I think I’m getting bored with Fedora (and Red Hat for that matter). Don’t get me wrong I’ve been rather faithful for a while now but I keep getting the feeling that I’m missing out on something better. I’m not one of those “tweak, fiddle, poke and prod” kind of Linux guys. I’m more of a “get my job done and get out” kind of geeks.

I remember back in the summer of 1995 when my college roommate (Lamont Lucas, where art thou?) and I got ahold of some free ARCNET network cards and a hub we decided that we needed a seriously professional network capable operating system … to play games. We embarked on a mission to acquire Windows NT 3.51 for free (we were REALLY poor college students) to no avail. Windows 3.1 for Workgroups was rather dull and painful. We heard some rumors from some obscure newsgroups about this seemingly unknown OS called Linux. A dozen 3.5″ floppies loaded with Slackware, one solid weekend and a lot of guts later we both had working systems (my 60MHz Pentium and his 486DX2 66MHz) with no GUI. Configuring XFree86 was another matter. That took lots of trips back to the computer lab to read all about the wonderful ways that misconfigured modelines could literally turn your monitor into a smoking brick. Eventually we both had working X setups and were happily tweaking away at fvwm to get everything just right. I can still remember the first moments of having a working Linux machine at my feet and again when I had X working. It smelled like victory.

I then spent the next several years tweaking my X desktop. I tried several distributions but mostly settled on Slackware. I ran SUSE for a bit but felt more somfortable with Slackware. I also tried every window manager under the sun. Remember fvwm95? It looked just like Windows 95, only worse. Using Linux at that point wasn’t a matter of productivity, it was more a matter of pride. Another roommate of mine later told me not to waste my time on that crappy little OS because it wouldn’t go anywhere.

So my primary desktop has been Linux for the last 6.5 years (just about every version of RedHat since 6.2) and roughly 50% of the servers under management at work (Rackspace) are Linux based. It’s not going away anytime soon. I am on my 3rd laptop that has run absolutely nothing but Linux. I get the usual sneers at work when I have some obscure issue when I undock my dual-headed HP nx9420, close the lid, walk to a conference room, open the lid, connect to a projector and something doesn’t work quite right. I’m sort of used to things needing a little tweaking here and there to get working. I have to say that Fedora Core 6 on this nx9240 has been rather nice yet not trouble free. The usual Linux stumbling blocks like APM, wireless and video (crazy 1680×1050 resolution) have all worked out of the box. I did struggle with the dual headed setup though, the media card reader isn’t supported yet and the thumbprint scanner isn’t really useable. I hear these things are almost all fixed in Ubuntu so I’m thinking of switching.

Keep in mind that I’m probably the atypical Linux geek here. I don’t mind tweaking things to get them functional but I really don’t want to be required to do so. I have a job to do. I have lots of code to sling and not much time to do it. I don’t want to be wasting my time dealing jacking around with yum repository settings just to keep gstreamer from killing itself. Ideally I’d prefer my OS not get in the way.

It all comes down to this. To any of my Linux listeners: What distro do you recommend? Is Ubuntu where it’s at these days? Is Gentoo worth a shot? Should I give SuSE another shot? Is Fedora 7 going to be the shiznit? What are your thoughts?