I was a bit unhappy with the performance of Ubuntu Karmic and Ubuntu Lucid (mostly the start scripts to handling filesystem errors at all…) and decided it is time to try a RPM based Distribution again. I really don’t like to wait for a download of a DVD and then to upgrade the whole system with new software after the installation. Coming from Debian I totally love the slick network installer. This means I have to install my RPM based distro like this or I will stay with Ubuntu or go back to Debian. I have tried doing with OpenSUSE some time ago and it failed miserable, so now it was time for Fedora. So here is a random list of notes I hate about Fedora.

• Netinstaller needing a 200MB download. One can build a whole GNOME image with that…
• The guided partitioner is nice and fails. It picks a 500MB boot partition which is not enough if you want to use pre-upgrade later to upgrade your system (which silently fails when going out of disk space…), so I want to increase the boot partitions size, but I need to delete the LG and PV of LVM before.. So at the end my guided partitioning was all manual as I want to change the size of one partition… this could be handled way better.
• YUM is awfully slow and one is not encouraged to do the equivalent of a “apt-get dist-upgrade” with it, one needs to use a installer CD to do the upgrade. This seems to be really backward.
• I had to learn the wonders of rpm –rebuilddb during a failed upgrade…Something upgraded the berkeley db version or such.. and the package database was corrupted.
• Removing pulseaudio (it takes like 50% of CPU time on my netbook) removes bluez..

Besides that Fedora seems to be a robust and well maintained distribution which contains really recent versions and sometimes even the future… like systemtap with a utrace enabled kernel to trace user applications.