Happy, or not.

Not sure.

Haven't wrote in a while here; in a sense, I just kept using FOSS just out of habit, part political stance, part un-willing to pay for stuff or endorse piracy by resorting to it.

Right now, it's been months since my wife has last complained about her laptop (no brainer: ubuntu 10.04) - she sees so much viruses and malware all around that she's quite happy with it. Plus, OO.org seems
to have made huge progress in the compatibility department. If only you could plug-in a beamer for meetings...

My laptop, then, is Debian 'current'; and in this case, current means 'always something wrong, always'. I keep telling myself that the next time stuff works I will stop upgrading anything, but dam'it, there is never such a moment. Lately, suspend was dead, now it's bluetooth and startup screens that are borked.

The desktop received the Arch treatment, and I was astonished, mainly by the level of documentation; their wiki is wonderful, and so far I have resorted to the forums only twice. To no avail, by the way. As it is, this wonderful pile of documentation is alas not necessarily useful outside of Arch. If Arch wasn't doing all the startup sequence in such a special way, then the heap of docs would be much, much more usable for everybody. Now, the basics work great up to silly details like numlock and such. But the everyday part, normal-user mode with Enlightenment DR16 and some x services running without a proper Login Manager doesn't work well: radiotray crashes the startup of E16, and empathy slows it down seriously: you can't just autofire them through scripting, you have to wait for E to be loaded and then manually start your needed services. Sure, it ought to come from my obsession with minimal services/install, but yet it 'just doesn't work'

Ah, then, the Old Dog: Slackware is back (again, after being my distro of choice for years) in 13.1/64 form: installed 3 times already, tried to upgrade to current, crashed it sometimes as soon as after first reboot, opening a menu in Konqueror - crash and that was 20 seconds
after the fresh thing was up and running! Still no luck with dual screen with Nouveau (blacklisted by default in Slack ?!?) and without nv... Back to proprietary, again. (was same with arch). Good point is that I can install Slack in less than 30 minutes now :)
It still has this cool feature of not installing/pushing a bootloader if you don't want to, neat!
What's less neat is that udev joke that kills localisation that still around... I have to work on this one.
Hmpf.
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re-hmpf.