18:21 Wednesday, July 07 2009

Fedora 10 -> Fedora 11 upgade = disaster

I foolishly upgraded one of my systems today from Fedora10 to Fedora11. While the upgrade went smoothly, the end result has been a disaster. I use XFCE, and something is seriously broken. For starters, any new window opens /behind/ pre-existing windows. This means that I have to move or minimize whatever else is open to find the new window. Next, most of my XFCE configuration settings are either ignored or overwritten. The worst offender is the popup menu (right click), which is displaying defaults rather than what I've heavily customized. That wouldn't be such a big deal if it weren't for the fact that they decided to stop shipping the GUI menu editor tool. So now I have to manually rebuild the menu XML config, per this.
That alone wouldn't have been a complete deal breaker, but the worst is that both firefox(-3.5) and thunderbird(-3.0b2) both crash at startup. They do this even in --safe-mode. Even for brand new users without pre-existing data. After googling furiously, I found a temporary workaround for Thunderbird, but firefox is a complete bust. While using the 'official' Firefox-3.5 package from the Mozilla website doesn't exhibit the crash-on-start bug, it has a lovely new bug, where if I happen to open too many (where too many might be as low as 2) tabs with javascript intensive websites, it then segfaults. I tried a few different Firefox-3.5 builds from different sources, and they all fail in the same fashion. I ended up having to grab the Firefox-3.0.11 package from Mozilla to get back into a usable state.
On a side note, it would be nice if Fedora would stop fscking around with the default fonts for every new release. Every time I upgrade, all the default fonts have dramatically changed, and I need to adjust to seeing everything looking different again. This time was no exception with new "high quality free" fonts getting shoved down my throat. Seriously, stop it. I can't imagine that most people really want to see a new & improved font every damn time.
So all of the above was what I discovered in about 2 hours of usage. I'm afraid of what I'll find tomorrow.
I think I've finally learned my lesson. No more upgrades to the odd numbered Fedora releases. They're always severely broken in some way.