Bye bye, Ubuntu

A couple of years ago, I started using a new and (at that time) unknown GNU/Linux dsitribution. It was called Ubuntu Warty 4.10. The things I liked in that distro were the hardware detection module and the fact it stemmed from Debian, which I always wanted to give a try.

Two days ago, I decided to upgrade my system (a Feisty Fawn) to the latest version, Gutsy Gibbon.

The upgrade process died at 60%, more or less, due to a problem in the nvidia-driver install script which managed to give up after seeing a diversion from the base package (ah! total functions!).

Now, I have a half-upgraded system and I can't finish the upgrade as apt-get says everything is current, and have xorg doing all sort of funny things, the Gnome applets not working anymore, mplayer segfaulting... I even filed a help request in the Ubuntu forums, like any other newbie out there, but got nothing in return: perhaps the community has become so large that a rather common help request now pass unobserved...

So, time to change. It happened in the past and is likely going to happen again in the future: I switched from Slackware to Red Hat to Slackaware to Gentoo to Ubuntu. Now it's time for ArchLinux. I've been using it for a while now, on a VMWare VM and, apart from being quite satisfied, I'm impressed as well.

pacman works like a charm: simple and effective. Everything gets configured neatly and almost everything worked out of the box.

Of course, this means that I'll have to configure my devices and xorg myself, insted of relying on some Ubuntuish automatic tool. But, at least, I'd know what's going on.

So, bye bye Ubuntu. Welcome ArchLinux.