Call it a reality check.

After installs of Debian Wheezy, an unsuccessful upgrade to Sid, and more installs -- Ubuntu 12.04 and 13.10 -- plus some Debian Sid-derived live-disc tests (Siduction, Aptosid), I've decided that Fedora is where I should be right now.

Probably due to my hardware being so new and Debian Stable being so relatively old, my idea about returning to Debian didn't work out as well as I could have hoped.

And then I had trouble with X in Siduction and Aptosid.

Onward, upward. Ubuntu 12.04 wouldn't boot after install, probably also due to its age relative to my HP Pavilion g6-2210us.

Ubuntu 13.04 with the proprietary fglrx driver ran well enough that I still have it on the test drive, a separate 320 MB disk that I swapped into the laptop.

But Unity isn't for me, and I don't see much of an advantage at this point in Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 vs. Fedora 19 with GNOME and Xfce, which is what I'm running once again.

I found GNOME 3.4 in Debian Wheezy much more responsive than GNOME 3.8 in Fedora 19, but the other problems with graphics I had in Debian canceled out that speed improvement.

And the way I have it set up, Xfce 4.10 in Fedora is probably the best desktop environment I've ever used. And I do still have GNOME 3.8 to test when I wish.

I continue to use the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver from RPM Fusion, just as I continually hope for the eventual return of working suspend/resume to this laptop.

That's all I'm really missing.

And the pace of Fedora, which makes even Debian Sid look extremely conservative, offers the best chance of getting there as quickly as possible.

And as I've said before, for all of its forward thinking and new kernels, Fedora 18 and 19 have been remarkably trouble free.

For new hardware, especially when using UEFI, extra especially when dual-booting with Windows 8, I recommend Fedora without reservation.

Amid all the talk about the Steam gaming platform coming to Linux, and more specifically Ubuntu, I just learned that Steam is waiting to enter the RPM Fusion repository for Fedora GNU/Linux users.

These things happen in predictable patterns. Due to hardware issues I land in Fedora, and after six months it's time for something else.

Not that Fedora 18 and now 19 haven't been great, because they have.

But I'm wary of my AMD APU-based HP laptop's trouble with suspend/resume and 3D acceleration. I had both working for a very short time during the AMD Catalyst 13.6 beta's brief run.

But before that I had neither, and now I have decent 3D with AMD Catalyst but seemingly no hope of working suspend/resume with this AMD A4-4300M APU and its AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics.

And I'm getting tired of new kernels coming into Fedora, some with Catalyst support, some without. And it's past time that this AMD GPU (I think it's the Trinity family) get better support from the kernel and the free and proprietary drivers.

What I'm saying is that if the hardware support I need is not going to come soon, I'd like something more stable while I'm waiting.

So I started auditioning new Linux distributions yesterday.

And when Debian 7.1 and 7.2 Live DVDs both allowed me to successfully suspend/resume my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop, I was firmly pulled back into the Debian camp. To my "home" distro.

Read the rest of this post

I don't read NYTimes.com articles that often. But I got a link to one and started clicking around a bit.

There were little "warnings" along the way -- "You've read 5 of 10 ..." -- but I just kept going.

After 10 articles, I got the screen you see at the top of this post.

Now NYTimes.com is probably worth 99 cents for four weeks. But that goes up to .75 a week after that trial period.

That's also known as a 1400 percent increase.

NYTIMES.COM, ARE YOU HIGH?

I'm not a big NYTimes fan. I like the work of David Pogue, don't get me wrong, and NYTimes.com's technology coverage is pretty good. But it's a crowded field, and while I know you get the rest of the great journalism from the NYTimes for that .75 per week, which adds up to per month, the fact is that most media sites charge a lot less.

In fact most are free.

It's hard to charge a month and make a case that your content has that kind of value when most of your competitors are giving it away and hoping to support their operations with advertising.

If you're a big, huge, big (did I say "big" already?) fan and reader of the New York Times and spend hours a day on the site, I can justify you paying the per month.

But when it comes to technology news, there's a lot of competition out there, and the New York Times doesn't really stand out.

And for that reason, per month really doesn't beat free.

Here's my caveat: If this is working for NYTimes.com, and they're making a ton of money from subscriptions, MORE POWER TO THEM. I would like nothing better than for this sort of thing to work. But in today's Web news climate, I just can't see it.

I certainly CAN see niche content aimed at well-heeled business audiences commanding a subscription premium. And I can also see a micropayment-based model working out.

I can see online journalism dying on the proverbial vine without something to fund it.

But a blanket /month? That's for the New York Times faithful only, and that's not me.