Update on Jan. 16, 2014: Since I originally wrote this post, I succeeded in installing Catalyst with AMD's script in Fedora and buying myself a whole lot of time with that distribution. I also tried Debian Wheezy with live media containing nonfree firmware, and that is looking even better than Jessie if I don't want/need an EFI-friendly installer. My original plan was to stick with Fedora until the Debian Jessie freeze and then make the move (sometime late this year). But if Wheezy works out, I'd want to go to it sooner rather than later and avoid Jessie for as long as possible (or until suspend/resume somehow returns to my neglected AMD APU chip.

Update on Feb. 4, 2014: I have suspend/resume working in Fedora 20 with the fglrx/Catalyst driver, and I'm very confident that the same technique I used to get it working there will also work in Debian Jessie, so that means if I do want to run Debian in the near future, I can get working fglrx video, working suspend/resume and EFI booting with Testing/Jessie and don't need to use Wheezy unless I absolutely want to. The only thing that makes me nervous about installing Jessie now is the uncertainty over which init system Debian will end up with -- both in the Jessie and Jessie+1 cycles. But since I have everything but printing to my crappy HP USB printer working in Fedora, it's likely that I'll stick with it for the near (and maybe farther) future.

To keep a short story short, the maintainer of the proprietary AMD Catalyst (aka fglrx) driver for the Fedora-focused RPM Fusion repository doesn't want to do it anymore.

And he made this decision not before the release of Fedora 20 with lots of notice -- and not after with lots of notice BUT PRETTY MUCH DURING THE RELEASE with no notice.

That means my Fedora 19-to-20 upgrade left me without Catalyst. And that means much poorer video performance, higher heat and more fan noise for my newish AMD APU chip -- the Trinity series A4-4300M model with AMD Radeon HD 7420g graphics.

And while the open-source Radeon driver has gotten a whole lot better in the 3.12 Linux kernel, the Catalyst driver is much, much better for this hardware.

I already mentioned the slow video. I can barely run GNOME 3 with the open driver, and THIS LAPTOP ISN'T EVEN A YEAR OLD.

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In the course of my day job, I use Windows 7 all day. I have really nice Lenovo desktop hardware with a nice AMD processor and lots of RAM. Windows 7 is fairly solid. It's not Linux, but when compared to Windows XP, it's a world and a half better.

So is Windows 8 better than Windows 7? I still dual-boot Windows 8 on my laptop, a newish HP Pavilion g6 with an AMD CPU and enough RAM to be comfortable.

The Metro interface is distracting, looks terrible and doesn't add to productivity. In a keyboard-mouse environment, it's hard to know what to do to make Metro (or whatever it's called now) do what I want. It's not intuitive.

The desktop portion of Windows 8 seems much like Windows 7. That is good.

I'm not saying I'm a Luddite. And I'm not saying I'm not. But there's nothing in Windows 8 that makes me say, "this is better."

There are so many things wrong with the Windows model from the perspective of a user who prefers Linux (currently Fedora, though I'm thisclose to moving to Debian or Xubuntu), but when it comes to basic functionality, I can get along fairly well in Windows 7. Windows 8? I can't believe it's gone on this long.