Confession: I switched to Ubuntu
I’ve been a Red Hat Linux user for years, from somewhere around RedHat 7 in 2000, making the switch to Fedora Core 1 in 2003 and continuing to run the latest Fedora release from there on.
As soon as my chosen hardware arrived–a Dell Optiplex 755–I popped in the Fedora 9 DVD, and installed the OS. The installation itself was comparatively painless, but the provided open-source drivers for the ATI video card failed to work at all with the included Radeon 2400XT, requiring a hard reboot and dropping into single-user mode just to get a bash shell. I spent a couple of days coming up with a workaround hack that would allow me to boot my machine and run the OS at my monitor’s native resolution, but with no 3D acceleration.
It happened that at the time, one of my colleagues’ laptops was failing spectacularly and in need of a total replacement. In the interim, however, he needed to boot to a usable OS to keep working and to retreive what data he could. Rather than create a Fedora 9 boot disk, he went with Ubuntu, and reported a smooth installation process and ATI drivers which worked out-of-the-box and even provided friendly GUI links to download and run the non-free ATI-provided drivers. My interest was piqued, so I grabbed the Live CD, booted it up, and within minutes had a functioning Ubuntu system, with working video drivers.
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