Switched to Ubuntu

I have switched my EEE PC 701 to Ubuntu. I had been running Fedora 10 before that but I was disappointed when preupgrade did not seem to work. So as Ubuntu was very nice in my Virtual Box setup at work, I installed that instead of doing a clean Fedora 11 install.
One thing that had impressed me was that Ubuntu had handled the 8.10 to 9.04 upgrade seamlessly in my Virtual Box setup. It even had offered to upgrade while I was updating packages.
This, I think, is representative of the difference between Fedora and Ubuntu. The goals of Ubuntu are clearly defined and it's easy to tell when they fail: if it's not easy and seamless, they failed and they have to fix it.
For Fedora on the other hand, the target audience is less clear (power users, developers, people who want the bleeding edge, users of Red Hat Enterprise at work etc.) and I tend to think that the distinction between Red Hat Enterprise and Fedora adds to the confusion. As a result, it's less clear what a release should look like and what is more important: convenience for existing users or new features and improvements.

In the case of the upgrade to 11, the Fedora site even had a page telling me I should reinstall cleanly instead of upgrading. Quite the contrary of Ubuntu trying to lure me into upgrading and making it much easier and more natural than reinstalling.

This does not seem like much but that's how I ended up abandoning Fedora. That was not easy as I always liked Fedora and I prefer rpm over dpkg any day.

I wonder if and when I'll go back to Fedora. Any way, I thought it was good to write all this down, so that I can look at it again when I switch distros. I guess I am in for a good laugh when I read this post again ;-)

Notes

I have been looking at tools for taking notes and using quite a few for different purposes.
Archiving emails, bookmarks are pretty basic and common but they were lacking for many reasons.
Since a lot of the interesting stuff I come across is on the web, Scrapbook and Zotero were to pretty natural extensions of bookmarks. I tend to prefer Zotero and my only gripe is that it parses the html of the pages I load which is slowing me down when accessing big source files through opengrok .

For more local notes I have used:

• a local wiki with a server (notably MoinMoin which is pretty nice and in Python so it's easy to fix the rare problems)
• Tiddlywiki which is a self contained HTML/Javascript page and can show several little pages simultaneously (tiddlers)
• Freemind which is a Java mindmapping tool that shows pretty trees, can fold them easily and allows for quick keyboard only edition

This blog is an additional level of technical notes for things that are quite general, non controversial and that I would gladly share with anybody who cares to read it.

Now, this description might seem a bit vague but I feel that it corresponds to a purpose that is not well served by my other note taking tools. This blog being public, it's clear it only contains stuff that can be shared freely, which means I can copy anything from it, access it anywhere without concern of security etc.

The relative privacy of my other note taking tools means that I don't have to sort between public stuff and more private one. As a result they contain a mix of information with different publication/security constraints. This makes it difficult to decide where I can keep copies, where I can access the copies etc. In that respect the added value of the blog is quite clear, so let's see if it works...