Arch Linux
So: a couple of weeks ago, final-strawed by Ubuntu, I made the switch to ArchLinux. Here are a few thoughts on the whole fiasco process. No, honest, it wasn’t a fiasco.
The netinstall image positively refused to accept I had any kind of network capability so to the 201005 image I went, which asserted my hard drive partitions weren’t aligned to cylinders so a quick backup of the files and wipe later and it was installed. I say quick; it took some four hours to actually copy things across to the external hard drive. Quite why is beyond me.
So I had a text environment. With no wireless. Installing X, followed by GNOME 3, was a snap with an ethernet cable I brought along the next day. And I still had no wireless. As it turns out, GNOME 3 doesn’t install NetworkManager as a dependency. And I still had no freaking wireless. Apparently NetworkManager doesn’t install network-manager-applet as a dependency, even though it’s basically useless in GNOME without it. This took me until the next day to figure out.
Four days from deciding “I shall install this operating system!” to getting it basically usable would be a record for me but for TinyCore.
My opinion of GNOME 3/GNOME Shell has progressed from “this looks OK” (c. 2009) to “this looks crap” (c. March 2010) to “Im’ma try this out” (c. October 2010) to “meh” (c. November 2010) to “are they ever going to freaking release this thing?” (c. April 2011) to “holyfucking_crap_thisisawesome” (c. June 2011). Seriously. The Activities overview is exactly what I’ve been looking for in a task switcher for some time now. Dynamic workspaces is a Godsend. And the extensions system makes it dead simple to, well, extend the Shell.
And as you probably know, I suck at concluding paragraphs.
Whoops.
153 Ways That Things Can Go Wrong and Then Awesomely Right, or Inventive Solutions to Problems That Don't Exist
