Until last year, I'd been happily using a laptop bought in 2008! It had been shelved for many years and when I retired was brought back into service, but running Lubuntu, a lightweight distribution of Ubuntu Linux for the desktop. Incredibly, it served me well for about four years.
Last year, my wife replaced her laptop, so that she could run Windows 11. It was a mere(!) 7 years old and had (and still has IMO) a decent spec., but Microsoft had decided they weren't going to support it, so I took it over. Lubuntu were abandoning the lightweight aspect, so I decided that I may as well use another distribution and settled on Linux Mint instead, another Ubuntu variant.
It was OK, but the mouse pointer was often replaced by a spinning icon, indicating the system was a bit too busy to devote itself to my needs. There was the odd glitch and Ubuntu itself is now becoming resource-hungry, with a (crazy, IMO) minimum memory requirement of 6 GB, so I decided to replace it and chose Fedora Workstation.
I started and seemingly made reasonable progress at first. True, it was a faff trying to boot from a USB key with the new OS, but that's BIOS (or UEFI) for you. (A further complication for me is that not all USB ports on my laptop can be used for booting). The OS seemed to get installed, but I was left with a simple screen, no menu and just (so I thought) the ability to alter some settings by right-clicking the mouse. I rebooted the machine, thinking that would fix it, but was left with the same thing. In desperation I clicked on the top left of the screen which showed a sort of dash and a dot that I'd never seen before. Doing this then revealed the 'apps' with which to use the system - not a menu in sight! (Now, perhaps I should have read the documentation, or been a little more inquisitive, but I genuinely thought there was a problem). What a crazy decision to minimize everything on a new installation, where there is a high chance that the user, like I was, is new to the UI. It seems to be a triumph of aesthetics perhaps over common-sense and what a poor introduction to the UI (Gnome)! After several hours of playing around, I really hated it anyway and installed the KDE UI, which I had been using with Linux Mint. I did so, but couldn't fully get rid of Gnome, so decided to start again and to install Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop instead!
At this point, I discovered the fun was only just beginning! The main problems I encountered with this new OS:
- Whilst I'd been able to write the Fedora Workstation iso file to the USB key OK from Linux Mint and boot from that without too much difficulty, trying to do so for the new OS on Fedora Media Writer was a problem - I just couldn't boot from the USB key at all. It seemed that Legacy (BIOS) booting was no good and I had to use UEFI instead.
- After that, it booted from UEFI, but then it couldn't see the internal disk on the laptop! So, after much digging around, I found out that I had to change SATA operations to AHCI from RAID in BIOS/UEFI.
- I took the option to overwrite the existing Fedora installation, but that failed, so I chose to write to the entire disk.
- Finally, having installed the OS, I then installed Chrome and encountered a weird error with it. The issue was that while I could log in to my Google account, I couldn't see my bookmarks. Searching the issue came up with lots of helpful advice about synching the bookmarks, but I just couldn't see an option to do that. After, much digging, I had to enter chrome://sync-internals into the browser, then enable something called Sync-The-Feature. I got some pop-up about security and after that, the synch options became available and I was able to finally see my bookmarks! A pure Chrome issue or a combination of Chrome and new OS, I wonder?
I had a career in IT and am a reasonably competent user. Even so, I estimate it took at least 8 hours for me to get a usable OS back onto my laptop again. The experience puts me in mind of the difficulties I used to encounter decades ago, when nothing was ever simple with PCs and you needed to be a real 'tecchy' to get things working. Since then a lot has changed and we should expect things to work with minimal fuss. Software - OSs, UIs and applications - should be lightweight, should be intuitive and should not require extensive problem-solving. I'm quite dismayed that we seem to have gone backwards.
As to what happened, perhaps part of the problem is that there are too many flavours of Linux and UI out there and they have to work across a wide range of hardware. It's all very fragmented, as indeed was the Unix world before Linux. Maybe things would work better if there was less choice?
(Oh and by the way, simple copy-and-paste doesn't seem to work with the mouse on my new system!)
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