I am now running Fedora Core 6 and it’s really nice.

The installer doesn’t appear to have deleted my Windows installation, and after some fiddling with the graphics driver I have everything back to how it used to be - with extras. Fonts look nicer, the KDE theme is nice and soothing to look at, and lots of things Just Work without me having to spend hours fiddling. I like fiddling with things and learning how they work, but not when it gets in the way of me using my computer for normal things. I can write an X.org config file, but would much rather something did it for me.

I can plug USB storage devices in and they mount themselves properly. Everything is as it should be.

What’s really helped was moving my mail and data onto my server. I can use any computer in my house to access it now. There’s IMAP for mail, LDAP for addresses, SMB or SSH for file sharing and when I turn on the ports in my firewall, remote access to my mail and files.

Now if only I could build a recovery DVD that contained my system at this current moment in time. Having an equivalent of the XP System Restore would be handy too. I managed to break Yum by upgrading things and had to spend an hour undoing the mess. I always thought putting /etc in an SVN repository would be a good idea.