I suppose I’m trying to make my peace.
I’m enjoying my new Fedora 10 setup on my desktop. Not because it’s the latest and greatest. The fact that it works is good enough for me … aside from it not being Ubuntu. And frankly, I’m not 100% sanguine with the reformat-every-time-somebody-sneezes mill; at least Ubuntu 8.06 is LTS, lasting about 3 years if I were to want to wait that long.
What gets me is purely subjective, the only thing vaguely rational about it is thinking about the time I went to a LUG meeting while still a relative newbie and announced that I used CentOS. Those who’d been around a while were extolling the virtues of linux and its diversity, and how you can pick and choose. Funny, of the dozen or so there there, as I recall, there were probably at least 10 Ubuntu boxes. I recall feeling a bit of pressure to change. So much for diversity, score one for the fanboys.
As for my part, I guess if you grow up on one side of the fence the other side seems strange no matter what.
When I use my computers with some form of Red Hat (be it Fedora or CentOS) I truly enjoy using it, even when what I’m doing has nothing to do with the underlying OS. On the other hand, when I was using Ubuntu, the experience was quite joyless. Sure, it did what I wanted. Sure it met two important criteria for me (the immediate criterion of supporting my printer, and the general criterion of not having to reformat every time someone sneezes.) Sure, from a technical perspective, the user experience was identical other than a few minor administrative differences. But the joy seemed to have been sucked right out of things.