That's actually very sad to hear. I used to love Fedora and used it all the time as well. After about half a year of running an unsupported version (14), I switched to Arch. I was thinking of getting back to Fedora to learn some basic RHEL stuff, but it seems that I am not going to be running the latest versions because of what you report. It seems that 14 really was the last great version of Fedora (which I feared when 15 came out).

Alex Brinister

Salix is great for "lazy slackers". 100% compatible with Slackware, but with user-friendly installation and package management, and extra software. It also uses Xfce as the default GUI. It's always best, I think, to gate a distro which specialises in your preferred desktop: they have more users and so problems get spotted and solved more quickly.

Bridge will give you an Arch installation with Xfce: you can't get less like Debian that that!

Salix has a tool in the menu to install media codecs and Bridge offers to do it at first boot.

It sounds like you would like more of a power-user distro: you might like Slackware, ArchLinux or Gentoo.

I think Slackware is fine but there are a few things I didn't like: creating a multilib installation is a bit of a headache (not to mention updating multilib packages), it comes with a lot of extra packages you don't need for something as basic as an XFCE desktop, and I didn't have much luck with slackpkg in my multilib install. I never did try sbopkg though so I can't comment on that.

ArchLinux: I tried it out, but the packages are too bleeding-edge (with bleeding-edge dependencies) and I didn't want the headache of figuring out which version of a package is stable. They have a ton of packages including the AUR and they have an awesome wiki.

Gentoo: installation is very tedious following the handbook (I use an ArchLinux USB to install Gentoo) but it is customizable, powerful, and you learn a lot. Updates can be a headache sometimes but it has a lot of things going for it. USE flags help you figure out what the dependencies are so you don't pull in a bunch of junk, everything is compiled for your architecture and your CPU, and the package tools are top-notch.

Upgrading Slackware to multilib is easy, but you have to add the main multilib packages to the slackpkg blacklist and use AlienBOB's exclusively, but it's not that big a headache afterwards and AlienBOB usually keeps his software up to date.

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