I'm still a fedora user, even after years of releases that seem to cause more headaches than they solve.  I understand it's a bleeding edge distro.  But at the current rate of change it's bound to bleed out by the end of the year.  Systemd is a pain for me as a developer and so far does not seem to improve any boot time issues.  We're not down to 1 second boots, though we do seem to be down to 2 second shutdowns.  Big deal.  I only reboot when I do a system upgrade.  And then a bunch afterwards to fix everything broken by the upgrade.

Most of my systems (and I have many between work and home) are running F16 with a couple f14 and one F12.  Last week my desktop at work had a disk failure and I had to reinstall.  So I jumped to F19.  I expected bumps along the way, especially given all I'd heard about the modified installation process.  It turned out that the installation went fine.  It's the running system that's giving me problems.

First, nouveau crashed repeatedly.  I put up with three of these before switching to nvidia's akmod.  Unfortunately, I put the wrong one on the first time.  After a few hours of cleaning up the mess I went back to nouveau, went through a few more crashes and then tried nVidia's drivers again.  This time I got it right.  System stable.  Just incredibly slow.

The desktop experience is almost painful with this release.  I'm using xfce and firefox.  Scrolling in the browser is jumpy.  Switching workspaces quickly causes window refreshes to be very slow, on the order of seconds (at times, up to 20 or 30 seconds).  evolution is slow too.  Just clicking on one message and then the next takes a full second or longer to change the display.  Maybe this is a change to the way spamassassin is integrated.  It wasn't that slow in F16.

These issues may not be related but the overall effect is the desktop experience is terrible right now.  I'm trying to work from a single workspace for most of my work but that's a change from my usual workflow.  And I'm not liking it.

There are threads online that state that setting "slub_debug=-" will disable debugging in the kernel to improve performance.  However, my kernel is not supposed to be a debug kernel (though the kernel config shows lots of debugging enabled).  I disabled slub_debug and performance improved slightly.  Workspace switching may be a little better, but not much.  Evolution seems a little better, but that may be due to some config changes I made.  Firefox isn't much changed.  I'm muddling through. Shading on my windows is slow.  I can roll them up quickly.  But rolling them down gets a white window for a couple of seconds before it gets updated with correct content.  I'd blame nVidia's drivers, but nouveau crashed, so I'm kind of out of options there.  I've installed all the X.org updates, all the evolution updates, all the browser updates.  All the updates.  Reboot, reboot, reboot.

Then there are all the application updates.  The first to annoy me (I'm old and easily annoyed by change on my desktop) was screen

screen -t blah 1


to this

screen -T linux -t blah 1


Now things work again.  And that's totally by accident.  There was nothing online I could find about this problem.  I just read the man page again and experimented.  Lucky me.

There were additional issues with getting the volume control working again.  More twiddling with pulse-audio and plugins.  I'd write those down here but I've already forgotten what I did.  Trial and error.   Disabling the firewall is changed.  google it.  Not hard, but it has something to do with systemd tools.  The GUI is gone.  Then there is the change to, I think, autotools.  A GTK+2 app built on F16 just fine.  On F19 I have to add -lphtread to the Makefile.am.  Both F16 and F19 libc require -lpthread.  In F16 autotools (autogen.sh/configure) picked it up automatically.  In F19 it doesn't.  Why?  Seems pretty important if libc requires it.  Who provides it to autogen?  Doesn't appear to be glib or gtk (based on pkconfig).  So something internal to autotools appears to have changed.  And broken.  I muddle on.

I've already switched a number of systems that are pseudo-production oriented (media servers, dev servers) to CentOS because I need them stable for long periods.  I've wanted to stay with Fedora mostly because getting media playback was easier on it than on CentOS (and I have no interest in ubuntu or variations thereof).  If I can find the tricks to getting media playback working as easily as Mauriat Miranda's Fedora instructions I may switch to CentOS on all my systems.  Interestingly, I still haven't tried the media playback stuff on F19 at work.  I just listen to GotRadio in a browser.  Maybe I'll switch to CentOS before I try them.  Till then, I muddle on.

Then again, I have my own distro for my Raspberry Pi.  Maybe I should extend it for the desktop….