Fuduntu 14.9 – A semi review

A few days ago I remembered Fuduntu. I had been running Ubuntu 10.10, and, while I was enjoying the smoothness I’ve always had a bit of fear of Ubuntu and the way it tries to hide the command line. I have in the past attempted to run Fedora, Debian, Arch and even Slackware (as well as a ton of derivatives) but I always kept coming back to Ubuntu, mainly because of the fact that there is almost always a way to get a program you want, wether it’s through the repository, a ppa or a deb package. Anyway, I wanted to leave Ubuntu, especially with trying to avoid both Gnome 3 and Unity and the power problems I was having. I was digging through the days new Linux news at tuxmachines as usual when I found an article on Fuduntu. I recalled the name and that it was often compared with Fusion, another Fedora based distro. I wound up on the Fuduntu website where I discovered, much to my delight, that Fuduntu had some sophisticated power management utilities. Overjoyed, I hit download and proceeded to wait for several hours as I downloaded the over one gigabyte file on my mediocre Internet. Once it finally finished I downloaded Unetbootin, plugged in my trusty 2 gigabyte USB drive that I use solely for making live USBs of Linux distributions of and rebooted. The bootsplash was simple, but pretty and it booted moderately fast for a live USB, although having used xpud I’ve certainly seen faster. Once the distro booted and loaded the typical Gnome 2 desktop I noted the pretty AWN dock and the preloaded Compiz setup. The gtk theme was also nice, and the Faenza Cupertino icons were of course wonderful. Pleased with both the configuration and the speed I proceeded to install. All went well as it always has for me with Anaconda and within half an hour I had rebooted and was Ubuntu free once again. After restoring all of my settings and installing Pidgin I set about the interface. I think this is the first Linux distribution I’ve used yet that I didn’t change everything immediately with. Still, I did wind up removing the AWN in favor if DockbarX in the top panel. I also set up a Pekwm configuration as usual, which was no harder or easier then normal here. All in all Fuduntu is one of the best Linux distributions that I have ever used, and in my opinion is right up there with PcLinuxOS, CrunchBang and Salix for my favorite Linux distribution out there. If you need a distribution to try, I highly recommend Fuduntu 14.9.