Bad Experiences are Forever

This is a sort of follow-up and is opposite to the previous post. There are a couple things that I had bad experiences with that I should probably try out again; these things have probably left worse impressions on me emotionally than rationally.
First is Toyota. Toyota has had a rough couple years, starting with issues of premature rusting in its trucks' frames and leading up to the "unintended acceleration" fiasco. Through it all, it's managed to become #1 in sales, but this too has come at the cost of its quality; now, the parts it uses especially in the interiors of its cars are flimsier and aren't assembled with the same attention to detail as before. My family owned a 1988 Toyota Corolla, and it ran beautifully until 2004; it was solidly built, and the attention to detail was striking. Now, no more. That said, the unintended acceleration fiasco (which pushed my skepticism of Toyota over the edge) is finished and its new cars are pretty solidly built and competitive, so I really shouldn't instinctively turn me away from all Toyota products (though I'd still rather wait a few years before recommending their products to anyone again).
Next, Fedora. I tried the Fedora 11 "Leonidas" GNOME live CD about a year ago, and I loved it. I really liked the fact that it, unlike Linux Mint 7 "Gloria", detected all of my hardware out-of-the-box (including my graphics card and monitor at its native 2048 by 1536 resolution). So I decided to install it. That was a terrible idea: not only did it fail to install properly, it also managed to mess up my existing Linux Mint 7 partition at the same time. I tried again, and it still didn't work. I then decided to hold off until the next release. Version 12 "Constantine" was worse; no live CD or live USB I created (the usual way) would boot. That's when I gave up on Fedora. That said, just about a week ago, I and a friend of mine (who is a Red Hat/Fedora guru) installed Fedora 14 "Laughlin" GNOME on a mutual friend's laptop (which was suffering from a slow and malware-ridden installation of Microsoft Windows 7). The installation itself worked flawlessly, and aside from multimedia codecs (which was easily fixed through the handy program Autoten), everything worked out-of-the-box — Skype (i.e. webcam and mic), printing (and scanning), desktop effects, etc. Given this, I really shouldn't hesitate, yet I still do. Maybe it'll happen when Fedora does actually support NVidia's Optimus technology.
Finally come laptop touchpads. Wait, no — those are ergonomically inferior to external mice. Whoops! (Heh heh.)
So what are your thoughts on this? Do you also dislike things more emotionally than rationally? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Featured Comments: Week of 2010 December 5

There was only one post that garnered comments, so I will be reposting all those comments.

Fedora 15: A Potential Savior?

Reader yochalgal had this to say about it: "The reason fedora 15 will have that ability is because they are switching from X to wayland as a display server. Ubuntu (what mint is based off of) is also switching. So you will have that ability." Of course, the Linux Mint developers have said that they won't be switching to Wayland exactly when Ubuntu does.
An anonymous commenter added, "The Nvidia-Intel video problem stems from the newer Optimus line of Nvidia cards. Nvidia has said they have "no plans" of supporting the switching technology under Linux. That means that in Linux, the Optimus cards will be locked into the Intel graphics performance, while keeping the Nvidia card on as well. Poor performance and poor battery life. Worst of both worlds. Hopefully Wayland will be able to work around this issue."

Thanks to all those who commented this week. Once again, if you like the material, please continue subscribing and commenting! (Also, I have final exams this week, so I won't be posting stuff as frequently.)

Fedora 15: A Potential Savior?

One of my friends was showing me today a Gource-created video of his semester's work that he made on his Fedora 14 "Laughlin" laptop. It looks really nice, but even though it has a quad-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, and a very nice AMD ATI dedicated graphics card (I don't know exactly what model/specs), it still took a couple hours to do (i.e. far longer than it should have).
I told him that I'd love to be able to do a similar thing on my laptop, but given that it has even lower specs than his, it would take even longer. This is also because Linux Mint 9 LTS "Isadora" doesn't properly recognize my NVidia graphics card, so I can only use the Intel integrated card which works fine for me now but would choke under such processor-intensive activities. He then told me that Fedora 15 will have native support for seamless switching of graphics card drivers (especially these NVidia-Intel setups).
Linux Mint, I've loved using you for the last year and a half, but I'm definitely going to be looking into this more closely, because I really do want to use my laptop to its full potential in Linux. If Fedora 15 is relatively stable, I'll probably be using it until Linux Mint gains similar support (and if it comes in the rolling "Debian" branch, I'll just use that then). In any case, I'm excited!

NVidia, Linux, and Hardware Acceleration

When I got my Asus laptop, I immediately installed Linux Mint 9 "Isadora" GNOME and searched for the proprietary NVidia graphics driver. For some reason, at that time, nothing turned up. I didn't really worry about it, as I could enable 3D acceleration and desktop effects anyway, and they worked really well, as they still do. A few days ago, I got the idea of looking again to see if I could install those proprietary drivers, as those might give my computer using Linux Mint even greater graphics capabilities. To my pleasant surprise, this time, the drivers were found and had already been downloaded; all I needed to do was click "Activate", and I did. I then restarted the computer and logged back in, only to find that I could no longer use desktop effects. Well, that was strange. The thing is, I have 2 graphics cards in this computer (an NVidia GeForce 310M and an Intel GMA 4500); Linux Mint recognizes both (as tested in the terminal), but I don't know for sure which card is being used. Furthermore, deactivating the driver brought back desktop effects. Has anyone else had similar issues? Does anyone else know what to do in such a situation? Thanks in advance!