My Fedora 27 system died a less-than-noble death at the hands of a Fedora 28 upgrade.

Maybe my error was upgrading too early (it was about a week after the release), or maybe it was because my system was too old. I probably started this installation on Fedora 17 or 18. That's a lot of upgrades, and one was bound to go south. This was that one.

So I reinstalled Fedora 28 from the ISO via USB, keeping my same partitions. (Note to Fedora developers: This should be easier to do. I had to bluff my way through it.)

Now that I have a new Fedora, I'm trying to keep it simple.

Instead of a bunch of desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE), I'm sticking with the stock GNOME.

I'm only slowly adding the things that died with F27. I just added the RPM Fusion repositories, and before that I installed the Ruby programming language and all the packages I needed to install the gems I need. I have everything

I don't even have Google Chrome. Don't need it. Firefox has made a lot of progress in the past year, and who doesn't need less spying?

Normally I'm an Xfce user, but I can get around (and get along) with GNOME 3.

Nautilus -- or Files as it's now called -- is appreciably fast, especially compared to the Windows file manager (where the lag is not a deal breaker but is noticeable).

I'm enjoying using gEdit (aka Text Editor). I'm not saying I won't add Geany at some point, but for now this works. I added the gedit-plugins so I could get the built-in-terminal, though Menu - Tools - External Tools - Open Terminal Here is probably more useful.

Since I had to reinstall Fedora 28 (though I got to keep my files), I'm still setting things up.

Among those things I'm still setting up is Dropbox. Since the Dropbox service itself is not free software, you won't find a Dropbox package in the main Fedora repository.

You can get an RPM package directly from Fedora, but I don't recommend it. Why? Because I just installed it, and dnf was having issues with the Dropbox repo.

So I removed that package, removed the repo from /etc/yum.repos.d, and added the RPM Fusion repositories with the links on the configuration page. Make sure you get both the free and nonfree repos.

Then install Dropbox from the command line:

$ sudo dnf install dropbox

Note on RPM Fusion: You can certainly run Fedora without RPM Fusion, but I wouldn't.

Dropbox update: The Nautilus integration with Dropbox -- at least when it comes to those little icons that tell you if a particular folder or file is synced, syncing or not synced -- is broken. I can't tell if it's me, Dropbox, or GNOME Files that is messing up. I tried completely deleting my Dropbox dot files/folders, and that didn't make a difference, except for a long operation to re-sync everything.

The only reason I'm revisiting this topic is that a failed Fedora 27-to-28 upgrade forced me to reinstall Fedora 28, and I just had to get Ruby and a few gems installed and working.

It wasn't easy, and it makes me want to recommend Ubuntu and Debian over Fedora because I strongly suspect that those distros make it easier.

My first recommendation for Linux in general is to use the Ruby that your distro ships with. I know there are ways to get exactly the Ruby you want, and there are developers who need to do that, but I'm not in that particular boat, so I use what the distro ships.

In keeping with the distro-approved Ruby, I also try to use the local Linux package manager to install as many gems as are available. Linux package management makes everything easier and less prone to breakage, so I try to use it wherever possible.

I needed the nokogiri gem, and that was available as a package.

Not so for the twitter gem. I needed to use gem install, and right away I ran into a problem. Before I could install (and build) the gem, I needed to install a few things in Fedora. Luckily I found this web page that told me exactly what to do:

$ sudo dnf install ruby-devel
$ sudo dnf group install "C Development Tools and Libraries"
$ sudo dnf install redhat-rpm-config

Only then could I use gem install to get the twitter gem:

$ gem install twitter

I'm pretty sure that both Debian and Ubuntu package the twitter gem, making all of this unnecessary.

It's never a good idea to upgrade a Fedora system in the first couple of weeks. Also, my particular Fedora installation is, for lack of a better word, crufty. I can't remember which version of Fedora it started out with, but I've been running Fedora on it since 2012.

That's a lot of Fedoras.

I don't use that laptop very much these days, but I decided to do the upgrade anyway. The F28 upgrade wouldn't proceed due to various conflicts in the packages. I did a sudo dnf autoremove, then I manually removed the rest of the offending packages, none of which looked so critical that they would break the installation.

But break it did. The Fedora partition wouldn't boot. I didn't even get dumped into GRUB. I couldn't get past the MOK screen -- something I've never even seen before. I tried one of the "rescue" ISOs, and that didn't work. The laptop's complaint was about keys being trusted, and the fact that I had Secure Boot turned off didn't seem to matter. I "enrolled" all the keys/hashes I could find. Still nothing.

Like I said, the system was crufty. I had a pretty good backup of the files, so whatever happened wouldn't really hurt my data.

I decided to reinstall but keep the same partition layout and preserve the /home partition/directory.

I didn't mention that I use encrypted LVM (both in Fedora and Debian). Even so I could have pulled the drive, dropped it into a USB plug-in holder and gotten the files off that way. But I wanted to see if I could resurrect the Fedora system.

I put F28 on a USB thumb drive and started the installation using manual partitioning. I kept all of my Fedora partitions, root (aka /), /boot, /home, and /swap. It was fairly easy to do this. The only "stopper" was the root partition. It wouldn't "go into" the "Fedora is going to use this" part of the installer. Eventually I figured out that it was because I had to check the "erase this partition" box. Then it skipped over with the rest of the partitions. I started my Fedora install -- I opted for the standard Fedora Workstation with GNOME -- and soon enough I had a new, mostly cruft-less Fedora system. I had to re-create my user account and set the password, but all of my files and most of my configuration was still there. I'm missing a lot of packages, but I had a thicket of desktop environments, useless (to me) applications, programming languages and other things that I could either do without or easily build back up.

All the files were there.

tl;dr: I would have preferred to perform a successful "rescue" operation on my broken Fedora boot system, but that didn't happen, so I did the next best thing, which was to reinstall Fedora and restore my system to bootable status that way.