Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

As Fedora 19 was released, I decided to go ahead and upgrade my laptop.

First of all: Gnome is getting worse with every release. More fancy aka-Mac view, less customization and more annoying useless things around. So my patience ended and I decided to follow my brothers example and migrate to MATE. It took some time to replace Gnome+GDK with MATE+LightDM, but I managed. Now I have an old style Gnome2-like desktop, simple login screen, bunch of customization options and flying (in terms of speed) working environment.

Few things that I had to fix:

• network manager applet (need to install network-manager-applet package for applet to come back)
• Russian layout was giving me a problem and disappearing from time to time. While checking around I found there is a problem with Russian legacy layout, so when I switched to just Russian layout (like it is in Windows OS) – all worked fine. Pity that few keys are in different places, but it’s ok. I am to lazy to fix that.
• Had to remove a lot of Gnome-related packages that were duplicated by MATE packages

Good thing is that I have a different keyboard layout per window feature back (was missing it a lot while using Fedora 18 with fail-safe Gnome).

One more thing to note is that Apache configuration was rearranged a lot, so it is easier to use new config and adjust it instead of trying to rewrite the old httpd.conf and related stuff.

While playing around I also tried Claws mail client to check if it is any better than Thunderbird (I know about Gmail being cool, I use it and prefer it to anything else, but I have cases where I am forced to use local IMAP client). Claws mail is pretty good and a bit faster, but threaded view support is not that advanced and I decided to stay with Thunderbird for a time being. Didn’t even thought of check Evolution, as I still remember those feelings of using heavy Outlook-like monster for reading emails.

Finally, just in summary, it appears that I use my laptop with the following software:

• Google Chrome (browser)
• Terminator (terminal)
• Skype
• Pidgin (for ICQ, corporate XMPP and Google Hangout)
• KeepAssX (password management tool)
• Thunderbird (corporate mail)
• ClusterSSH (simultaneous management of many systems over SSH)
• LibreOffice Calc and Writer (for corporate bureaucracy stuff)
• vim (all time best text-editor)
• subversion

I think the list of tools used is decreasing every year a lot and most of the stuff goes online. Movies/music/pictures/mail/document and whatever else is much easier online now and only corporate policies stop me from shrinking the list above to be twice shorter.

Anyhow, I will see how Fedora will act, but I think this release looks pretty good, if configured properly.

P.S.: for those who is confused with Grub2 configuration (just remember someone was complaining recently), the easy way to change basic arguments for kernel boot is:

• edit /etc/defauls/grub (pretty strait forward config file)
• run grub2-install <boot device>
• run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
• run ln -sf /boot/grub2/grub.cfg /etc/grub2.cfg
• reboot