So, last week I decided that it was time to reinstall Linux on my laptop. Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I followed the advice of #linux and installed Fedora instead of Debian.

I have to say that, despite my misgiving, I was impressed with Fedora. Right out of the box, everything worked. Wireless, XFree86, cups, you name it. And it looked damn good. Nice, crisp anti-aliased fonts.

I played with it for several days, I was able to use Red-Carpet to install Mono and all the dependancies in order to get MonoDevelop to run. Heck, I even had Mono CVS building smoothly.

Despite some frustrations with yum/red-carpet/up2date not being what I’m used to with apt-get, I was content.

And then my hard drive died.

Do you realize how hard it is to find a decent replacement laptop hard drive on a Sunday? It’s bloody difficult, I’ll tell you right now. You would think that, living as close to Chicago as I do, that there would be one store selling higher-end hardware. I had my eye on a top-of-the-line 7200rpm hitachi drive, but the only regional store that I could find that sold it, CDW, is closed on sundays.

Instead, I opted for a 5400rpm Hitachi drive with an 8Mb cache. So far, it feels considerably faster than the standard 4200rpm drive that came with the laptop.

Facing a complete reinstall, I decided that, although Fedora is nice as an easy-to-get-running desktop, it isn’t right for me. I like the power that I feel when I run `apt-get -t experimental upgrade`.

Now I’m back to Debian, running Kernel 2.6.4 and GNOME 2.6 and quite happy. Long live Debian.