After almost two years of holding onto Ubuntu 10.10, I finally gave up my love of Ubuntu/Gnome2/apt and moved to OpenSUSE 12.2 (rpm!). This is coming full circle for me as I started with Mandrake in 2002 which used rpm as the package management system.

Rpm has come a long way - no more dependency hell. But the star of the migration is KDE4. I have to admit that it has transformed from clunky and over-complicated to beautiful and refined in a most unexpected way (more so since I stayed away from it for nearly six years). I can clearly see KDE's refinement reaching new heights in a few more iterations.

After couple of weekends of tinkering and fine-tuning my desktop, everything works the way I want it to and my level of comfort is comparable to (if not more than) Gnome2. I can say that I'm content and settled with my new computing environment.

End of life with Maverick

Couple of days ago, Ubuntu stopped support for Maverick Meerkat 10.10. This is the last decent version of Gnome2 and I refuse to move until something better or atleast matching comes around (Mint is still evolving).

Canonical has given us a great distro but Unity is the worst thing they have inflicted on advanced users. I'll stick with my Meerkat.

Upgrade

So, my laptop was creaking with the weight of files more numerous than ants in an anthil, partitions more complicated than back-alleys of Banaras and symbolic links worse than a junction box in a sleepy town in Bihar. And all that accumulated over 5 years (no wonder my shoulders hurt when I carry it).

It is considered remarkable for a hard disk to last beyond 3-4 years and this one is positively a 100GB Fujitsu veteran. Therefore, I decided to upgrade to a new Western Digital Scorpio 7200 RPM 500GB disk and after multiple sessions of clonezilla (thumbdrive based open source disk cloner), many whirrs of Ubuntu 10.04 live cd (it is best to figure out the partitioning before dealing with gparted) and wrestling with bootloader (I'm staring at you Grub, you fithly beast), its finally up and running. No time spent on reinstallation/confiruging either Windows or Linux, no data loss and loads of space with additional 100GB unused.

I used to enjoy this kind of stuff. Now I feel I'm getting too old for this.