Before my Fedora 27-to-28 upgrade failed in a spectacular enough fashion that I had to figure out how to reinstall the operating system while keeping my user files (spoiler alert: I was successful in doing it), I had a system that had been though maybe 10 successful upgrades and had collected plenty of cruft along the way.

This particular laptop, now a 5-year-old HP Pavilion g6, made it through the transitions from yum to dnf and X11 to Wayland and from the time the Catalyst/AMD driver worked to when it didn't (and I didn't need it).

For the F28 upgrade to go wrong was very much out of character for my experience with Fedora, which I began using with F13 (quickly upgraded to F14) on my previous laptop, a 2010-era Lenovo G555, before an upgrade-gone-bad sent me to Debian for the rest of its life. That cheap Lenovo died a quick death in 2013, going to sleep one minute, not waking up, ever again, the next.

There were and are many reasons to run Fedora. But for me, the constant flow of new Linux kernels meant my at-the-time new hardware would be supported much more quickly than in distros that kept the same kernel for the life of the release. And to get that constant newness, all I had to do was make sure the system was updated. That was my No. 1.

Read the rest of this post

John Coltrane's rendition of "My Favorite Things" from the 1961 album of the same name) is pretty much a gateway into Coltrane.

This isn't that version. Instead, here is the 1966 version from "Live at the Village Vanguard Again!", with a much different band in an equally different era for Coltrane. Basically, free jazz entered, and he embraced it.

Though I love the "classic" Coltrane quartet, this is a great band, and I'm really listening to Alice Coltrane's piano -- I like her approach to the tune. Aside from John Coltrane himself, bassist Jimmy Garrison is the only other holdover from that classic quartet, and the lines he plays are also very different from those of bassist Steve Davis on the recording made five years before. You can tell that Garrison had played the tune live with Coltrane probably hundreds of times.

I'm still absorbing this version, but it's notable that the band plays a full 3 minutes before John Coltrane plays the tune's melody.

For comparison's sake, here's the "classic" rendition of "My Favorite Things" from 1961: