Fedora 13 sailing along

Even though I'm actively testing Ubuntu 10.10 (installed to a 4 GB USB flash drive) and find it extremely compatible with my current hardware (Lenovo G555), I expect I'll be sticking with Fedora 13 for at least the next few months. Everything's working too well to upset this particular apple cart.

That said, things I'll be looking for include return of a working open-source ati/radeon driver (not exactly holding my breath on that one), newer kmod-catalyst packages from RPMFusion that actually work with the current F13 kernel (who knows when/if this will happen) and seeing how everything involved in this Fedora 13 build works the next time there's a kernel update (and there hasn't been one for awhile).

So far I'm not encouraged by my Debian Squeeze tests. I'm worried ALSA won't allow for the headphone jack to mute the speakers due to some ALSA 1.0.21 bits alongside the 1.0.23. It's hard at present for me to test this thoroughly — I didn't install Debian to a USB drive; instead I transferred the .img to the stick and booted it that way, as a live image, which means I can't modify the settings and have it work differently on a reboot. I guess I'll have to do a reinstall to the stick to see how things really work.

If you've done a Debian installation lately, meaning in the Squeeze era, it's sort of startling how it looks exactly like Debian Lenny. That might be a good thing, depending on your point of view. I figure there will be a new wallpaper when Squeeze goes stable, but settings-wise the GNOME desktop looks no different than it does in Lenny. If you like shiny and new and don't mind purple/orange, Ubuntu 10.10 does offer a lot more from an aesthetic standpoint.

But I'll tell you, if Debian provides more functionality in a particular situation, the stability of a Debian release is not something to be ignored. It'll generally run faster, too.

As I said at the beginning of this entry, I'll very likely spend at least a few more months in this Fedora 13 Xfce environment since it's working so very well (and I've cranked through most of the configuration-related surprises and arrived at a pretty good place audio, video and suspend/resume-wise).