Well, I hope that this would turn out to be short and sweet(useful) post.
Since my college(2003-2007) days I have tried many flavors of linux. And my experience, well, has not been that encouraging. IMHO Linux falls short in 2 main areas 1 - hardware support for different types of hardwares 2 - out of the box working softwares. That seem to have changed in recent years. Internet is still essential resource if you want your Linux running smoothly.
At that time, I tried ubuntu, Suse, fedora, red hat, centos, mandriva and what not. They all used to work to some extent but configuring my combination of hardware was overwhelming task for all those distros. Display, sound, mouse, modem anything used to go wrong. Fixing it used to take painful patience and diligence. Worst of all, whatever tricks, tips you tried 6 months back wont work on other hardware/distribution/version/etc/etc. In short, your hard earned knowledge wouldnt stand a chance against the wave of time.
This changed and when I got my laptop(2010) first thing I tried was fedora. This was mostly a good experience, however, I would still not suggest Linux for starters. Windows is an extremely safe and stable bet, and of course its much more productive.
Almost everything worked at that time except wi-fi card. With some googling, I was able to fix that. Still, there was persistent issue of laptop overheating. I did try to resolve it, but it did not work. Using powertop, lm_sensors, lspci, HD SMART utilities did not have much impact. Laptop becomes blazing hot in summer and unbearable in other seasons. It wont shut down because of overheating or anything but I feared that it would melt the plastic parts eventually.
Come to 2013, and I tried fedora 17. This was even better experience as I got everything working out of the box including wi-fi card. Also, having running and stable internet means that I can install/uninstall easily. Otherwise, I would say that its still extremely difficult to make your Linux work properly without internet connection. There are a few thing which needed tweaks. So here is my take on fedora 17 -
You will need to add few more things to default fedora 17 post installation.
- get yourself acquainted with yum
- install non-free repositories
- install vlc and other utilities which would make mp3/video playback possible (yum install gstreamer gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg vlc)
Also I did -
- Enable gnome advance options[which are not so advance] (yum install gnome-tweak-tool)
- Enable power-off option under username menu (yum install gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu)
- install gnome extensions, easiest way is it open extension in firefox and switch on, this installs it automatically.
- install better install manger (yum install yumex)
I again had problem with overheating of laptop. I tried many suggestions mentioned on internet forums but thread like view provided by forums does not help much. In many cases solution works partially and reading entire thread becomes very confusing. So here is gist of what I gathered-
If you have ATI graphics card and newer laptop, chances are that you might face the problem of laptop overheating. This is mainly because of mismanaged power profile of the graphics card. Since GPU is always forced to run under high profile mode, it consumes lot of battery and overheats. To avoid this you can try -
echo profile > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method
echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
What this would essentially do is, it would set power profile for your graphics card to 'low'. Now, this worked in my case to an extent but it was not complete solution.
Default ATI drivers that come with fedora 17 are good from behavior perspective. There is no flicker, videos work and all, only there is problem with power consumption. Now, installing other drivers might solve this power problem(as suggested on forums). But this installation is not straight forward. ATI dropped support for older graphics card and hence latest drivers may not work. This happened in my case. Also, drivers available on ATI site are not available for fedora. I have Dell Inspiron laptop with ATI 550v card and latest ATI catalyst driver 12.10 does not work in my case. 12.6 should work for legacy cards, as per forums. So after numerous yum install and yum history rollback, I decided to try something on my own. Copy-pasting exact commands on forums did not help in my case. Finally, what I tried was -
yum install xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-legacy.x86_64
This fixed my problem! Now, I have cooler laptop and fully supported driver too!
Now that its working properly, here are some serious advantages of Linux which I would like to mention.
- start within minute, so its very useful when you need quick start
- its a great learning tool
- many free softwares could be easily found and used(like libre office suite, vlc), which may or may not be present on windows(shell scripting, cron, grep etc is not easily available on windows)
- its virus and bloat free. even when you use linux for years, it wont get bloated and would start withing minutes
