There are many reasons to love Linux. But there are also many reasons to hate it. And this is one of those reasons.
I’ve been trying to refresh Selene, my Thinkpad X22, since I returned my office-issue Thinkpad T60. I figured Linux would be a good idea as it had Kubuntu before and I was reasonably fine with it. Unfortunately, the only Linux installer I have on hand is Fedora Core 4 (circa 2005). It installed without a hitch BUT I was stuck with Firefox 1.0 which doesn’t support a lot of those Web 2.0 stuff out there.
I tried automatically updating Firefox but apparently the FC4 repository is no longer being maintained. It only contained a point release. My next recourse was to manually download and install Firefox 3.0. But it flat out doesn’t work. Missing library or something. I tried updating the library but, you guessed it, the repository is no longer being maintained.
I turns out that once a new version of the distro is released, the old version’s repository is available for only about a year and then that’s that. This means you need to reinstall your OS once a year! I could probably get things manually updated and working one way or the other but it would just be too much hassle.
Now contrast this with the much older Windows 2000 Professional which installs fine, gets updates fine, and runs Firefox 3.0 just fine, thank you. Now if only I can get rid of the damn spyware that keeps infecting it.