This is my story about how I went from hating the new Fedora so much I was ready to switch and then how switching to Cinnamon and making a few tweaks and it is now possibly my favorite distribution and desktop I’ve ever had. I hope this is enjoyable or useful to someone!
When I first upgraded to Fedora 20, I decided it was the worst Fedora release ever. I was having problems with every aspect of it. Even non-gnome apps weren’t working well. I was just about ready to give up on Fedora completely after using it since Red Hat 5, but decided I better try to fix some stuff first.
Some of the problems I was experiencing
- First thing was the graphics was all messed up and NO Catalyst support any more
- Then I realize its all about the changes to Xorg by Fedora so they can start moving to Wayland
- Then I notice that eclipse is completely crashing repeatedly
- Then I notice when running some apps gnome restarts
- Then I notice that sometimes gnome isn’t restarting but dying and causing the need for a full restart of X.
- Power management was shot
So after working out some Xorg stuff and getting a usable system I got back to work -- and this is when I really noticed most of those problems.
First I decided to try to clean up my home directory thinking that maybe there were some settings in there that were conflicting with the new gnome 3.10. This resulted in no improvements and actually completely ruined the performance of Lotus Notes to where Xorg would use 100% of the cpu and the system was pretty much unusable.
I had had enough. I started debating between going back to Ubuntu or going with Mint. After making the decision I would go with Mint between the two I decided I would check out a couple of the other Desktops that came with Fedora in case any of them were working better than Gnome 3.10.
And here is where things started getting better. The first thing I noticed is that yum revamped its group handling and using some new commands yum groups list and yum groups install … I added several desktop environments to start trying out. A very easy step -- I have done this many times before with yum group-install but this was definitely a nice refinement. Additionally the yum groups list organized everything into “environments” and then normal groups and also shows nicely what is installed and available. That was the first plus of the experience so far.
The other huge plus was how many environments are ready to install and use, highlights include:
- GNOME Desktop
- KDE Plasma Workspaces
- Xfce Desktop
- LXDE Desktop
- Cinnamon Desktop
- MATE Desktop
- Sugar Desktop Environment
First I tried XFCE which has a nice clean interface, although my fonts were not near as nice as they were in gnome. Also the performance of Lotus Notes was still shot. But at least gnome was not crashing repeatedly. But I was having power management issues and a few other complications and so decided it was time to move on.
Next up was Cinnamon, and let me tell you I have gone no further. Cinnamon is really a great desktop. I feel like I’m finally home after all these years of turmoil since starting on gnome 3. And it feels like a present to Linux since I believe today is his birthday. I really hope he gets this message to try Cinnamon.
So no more application crashes and I upgraded to IBM Notes 9.01 and it seems to be by far the best version of Notes to date and is performing very well under Cinnamon.
So how is my system now? Notes on some of these fixes below:
- Performance is great
- All crashes gone
- Fonts are beautiful
- And my power management is better now than it ever has been
- Eclipse was crashing because of some kind of conflict with the google-talk plugin -- I really haven’t been using google talk functionality on my laptop so this was just an uninstall.
- Cinnamon fixed all of the issues with gnome I was having
- I installed the cinnamon-workspace-grid to get my 3x3 desktop grid back (I think 2 dimensional workspace grids are a must for multitasking -- once you get used to them everything else causes way too much inefficiency)
- Power management required learning a bit about the new /etc/systemd/logind.conf and then everything is beautiful.
- Basically in that file I set
- HandleSuspendKey=ignore
- HandleHibernateKey=ignore
- HandleLidSwitch=ignore
- HandlePowerKey=hibernate
- And then I used Cinnamons Power management to set
- When lid is closed to hibernate on battery and “Do nothing” when on ac -- this should be the perfect setting when you use your laptop with a docking station (closed) with a couple monitors.
- Note I set the power button action to do nothing in the Cinnamon control panel and set it to be handled by systemd because there seemed to be issues with resume from hibernate the other way.
- At any rate the sleep button works perfectly and back up on running in about 3 seconds, the hibernate works perfectly and automatically when it is supposed to.
- Also as a side note, the Notes 9.01 install was the easiest install to date I downloaded from IBM and untarred it. then simply a yum localinstall *rpm and it was done.
No comments:
Post a Comment