Initially this post was meant to be called Moving to Ubuntu from Fedora. As I started to draft it in my head it kind of grew to a bit more general than a specific rant.

Late February after an update the mouse pointer started to act a bit weird in Fedora (27). It started to wiggle a bit and then after a while Gnome crashed. I tried to make sense of the logs, true different Kernels and even avoiding the mouse.

If I am not browsing it is easy to avoid the mouse, but scrolling and clicking on links without a mouse gets a bit tedious.

I do not mind Xfce, but it is really not a DE I can use unless I really have to. The idea did cross my mind as I am fairly accustom to Fedora / Red Hat.

My first experience with Linux was back in 1999 with Red Hat 5.2. Using the Afterstep DE. I would rather use i3 or Sway over Afterstep. It is kind of like the experience; I see what you are trying to to here, but no.

In my early days of Linux I did my obligatory distro-hopping. I always ended back with Red Hat (then later on Fedora) for two very simple reasons. The install was not bloated and Gnome has a simple layout, but not too stripped down like i3 and Sway.

I have been considering switching distro for a while, but I know Fedora well enough that I feel too at home with it. Again, very spoiled with the minimal install. For some time I was considering openSUSE as it is RPM-based, but a bit too bloated for my taste.

Arch is very appealing for its rolling release, but I just do not have the time to spend possible hours of configuration. I just want to boot the OS from an USB, install and be ready to go within an hour.

Fedora is not a rolling release, but it is close to bleeding edge. Something I learned recently. I guess I have been lucky for years to avoid any major bugs and crashes.

Call me impatient if you like, but I would whole heartedly disagree. If you get logged out within 10-15 minutes it is really not worth it. I use this laptop daily and often for several hours. I need a system that just works.

That is why I decided to give Ubuntu Budgie a go.

Budgie is a really nice DE. It is what I wish Xfce was. Slick and trimmed. I know it is risky to try a new DE that will most likely switch over to QT later on, but for now I just need an OS that just works. An OS I can do my daily stuff and write some code in without being logged out randomly within 10-15 minutes.

It was although with great hesitation that I went with an Ubuntu flavour. Ubuntu is well-known for being bloated and why I always stayed away from it. On the other hand, Debian and Debian-like distros have been very popular, so finding a .deb is often easier than finding a .rpm package if it is not in the repo.

So far this weekend it has been fine.

Instead of doing sudo dnf upgrade I do sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade instead. I am experienced enough with Linux that I do not really think about it that much.

I would also suggest Linux over any OS.

With precautions and caveats of course, something too many Linux users forget to do or are in denial about.

The bigger distros are fairly stable, but – they still feel like hobby projects.

This is the weakest part of Linux. Most of the time it feels like there is something missing or some part of a DE is kind of in a perpetual state of work in progress.

It is easy to argue that Linux is kind of a young OS, but it is really not the youngest. It is 10 years older than MacOS (OSX). MacOS has been through a few changes, but at least it felt finished every time.

I enjoy having options, but a XKCD cartoon comes to mind. The one about having 14 standards. Let us create a new standard to have away with those 14 standards. Instead we end up with 15 standards. That is Linux in a nutshell. Too many cooks in the kitchen that has an idea about what should be the standard, or is the perfect recipe.

Which is why I understand why some decide to use Arch. Sure it can take a few hours to configure, but when you are done you have the setup you want.

With that said, I remind myself that Ubuntu Budgie might just be a short term solution for now. I might end back using Fedora again. Maybe go all in and use Fedora Rawhide for the hell of it. As they say, in for penny, in for pound. Just go full-on crazy with a bash script that ensures I only update certain packages and then the whole system when I know it is safe to do so.

Or maybe I will buy a nice pen and a few Moleskine notepads. Move out to a cabin in the forest and go off the grid completely. Going back to letter writing via snail mail and using One-Time Pads for encryption. Because, why not?