Yesterday I switched my home desktop from Ubuntu 13.10 to Fedora 19 to have work environment ready for my Red Hat tasks.
Installation was easy as Fedora installer does not ask too many questions. But also does not give any software choice so I took KDE one. Made a backup of Ubuntu rootfs and /home partition and 10 minutes later I was running same X11 session but with Fedora logo in a corner.
Installing extra packages is argh… There is yum and basically nothing else. I tried Apper and Yumex — none of them was useful. Apper was unable to remove Konversation and message I got was useless (“some package depend on it” like). Yum did not have any objections. Yumex was even worse as it gave me a list of all packages without any grouping applied. Even “dselect” was better in 1999 when I started with Debian.
So I installed APT. This one works but only kind of… “apt-cache search something” takes eons, installing packages is impossible due to a way how RPM works…
Because RPM allows to have more than 1 version of package installed at same time. WHY? How it is supposed to work at all??? And no, I did not have any filesystem corruptions or something like that…
Anyway those problems can be bypassed or ignored. But then there are other ones. I always thought that Debian legal team has very strict rules about what can go into distribution. Fedora proved that I was wrong. External repositories are a must have here. MP3 or AAC playback? Forget. Probably also video playback etc. Want Google Chrome? Forget. I understand why Adobe Flash is not in repo (but there is one with it as well) but all that? Probably there are more entries here but I did not yet finished installing stuff I use/need.
Will have to add few tweaks here and there (like bumping “nr_uarts” kernel option to have all 7 serial ports) but it works. And I like “journalctl -b” way of checking what was going on since system boot ;D