Exploring Fedora - The LXDE and Xfce spins are on my radar

Sure, Ubuntu Lucid is running OK on my aging 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

But I feel the strain of all that gwibber-service/desktop-couch activity in the Ubuntu LTS. And while I'm making fairly regular use of the social-desktop features in Lucid, I'm aware of both the performance hit as well as the decidedly alpha feel of those features — and I'm including the Ubuntu One syncing service in that lot.

So I've been looking around for my next distro.

I've been experimenting with live CD systems such as Tiny Core and Puppy, and I quite like what I see in Debian Squeeze, having tried the alpha in a live image.

But I've run Debian before and will again.

I'm looking for something new. New to me, anyway.

I have enough "power" in my 8-year-old laptop to run GNOME, which I'm doing in Ubuntu, and did in Debian and FreeBSD. And I know full well that it's not GNOME dragging the system down at times so much as Firefox and, in the case of Ubuntu Lucid, all of that background processing that runs the social desktop and the cloud storage features.

When I tried Fedora more than few releases ago (the full, regular GNOME version) on my PowerPC-running Mac G4, besides not configuring the video correctly out of the box, I found it so much slower than Debian that I opted for the latter without a second thought.

But now I'm reconsidering Fedora. For one thing, a lot of people I respect in the Linux community are using it, and all the people I've met who work on the project are very open, friendly and committed to what they're doing.

And the more I learn about how Fedora works so closely and seemingly well with the upstream projects that by the dozens go into creating a full Linux distribution, the more I want to find out what the project itself is doing.

Even the Red Hat connection is looking like more of a positive than a negative. I'd still like to see more of a commitment to desktop Linux from Red Hat (and still wish the company had pursued the Red Hat Global Desktop strategy), but Red Hat's commitment to the Linux kernel, GNOME and much of upstream is admirable.

So I grabbed the ISOs for the LXDE and Xfce spins of Fedora 13. I'd like to spend some time in a lighter desktop environment than GNOME (yes, even though I continue to say that GNOME isn't the problem).

And I'd be lying if I didn't say that I want to get away from all the CPU-, memory- and disk-hogging things that are dragging my Ubuntu Lucid system down. While I like the social desktop, I don't need it as much as I need the extra resources for the rest of my computing tasks.

While I really don't care much whether my window buttons are on the left or right, the whole rancor over that change in Ubuntu, as well as the SABDFL (Self-Appointed Dictator for Life) status and recent pronouncements of Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth aren't exactly warming my heart at this particular moment.

It's complicated. I'm not interested in a distro by and for fanboys (and I hope that's not what Fedora is all about, although I'm sure that element exists in many if not most FOSS projects at this point), and I am interested in an operating environment for "regular" (i.e. non-fanboy) people, which I hope not just Ubuntu but other distros as well will become.

And Fedora's Red Hat connection can be seen in a similar light as Ubuntu's ties to parent company Canonical.

As I say, all of this is a bit complicated.

And when it comes to Ubuntu Lucid, I could run LXDE or Xfce in Lubuntu or Xubuntu, respectively, and dodge all the resource-sapping innovation in the GNOME-driven Ubuntu.

It gets even more complicated and convoluted — in my mind, anway.

For one thing, my liking of long-term-support releases is not something that Fedora is at all about.

But something stable enough to use, combined with continuing innovation — and hopefully not too much breakage or multimedia-codec-hunting pain — might be nice for awhile.

I'm running Fedora 13's LXDE spin from the live image right now, and I was able to use NetworkManager (some GNOME survives) to set up my nameservers. I was able to easily add a networked printer and get the relevant packages installed to run it. And I wrote this blog post in Firefox with minimal trouble.

And the fonts look great. LXDE is super-fast. And I was able to print out of LeafPad (which I've always heard doesn't support printing; guess now it does).

I should probably think about running the full GNOME, and I will test the Xfce spin from the live disc before I commit to one thing or another and move my files over from the backup drive.

But I'm looking forward to something new.

Note: If you came here from a link, here are my first impressions of the Xfce spin of Fedora along with more on the differences between the Xfce and LXDE spins and my "final" thoughts on the live environments.