I still have a Samsung R580 notebook. Running 13 years of age, it originally came with Windows 7 Home Premium, which isn’t Windows 7 Professional. Home Premium had a number of key limitations, but it was named Home Premium, so it must have had something premium about it, right?

Anyway, the first time I put Linux on it was late 2013, when I dropped Ubuntu 13.10 on the notebook, completely wiping Windows 7 off the drive. Over time I increased memory to 8GB, replaced the original rotating media with a 1TB SSD that’s still on it, and a new keyboard because the original keyboard was in pretty bad shape. Everything else is still original.

Yesterday I powered up the notebook to see if it would still power on, and to check on the state of its distribution. It did and I was greeted with Fedora 36. Back in June 2022 I replaced Ubuntu with Fedora 36 because when I tried to update from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 on the Samsung, it failed. After all those years of uneventful updates, this one wouldn’t take. With nothing else to loose I installed Fedora 36 and basically got the Samsung back in solid working order.

Since Fedora 38 was just released, I decided to update to the latest Fedora release just to see if it would. So I spent yesterday between chores around the house updating from 36 to 37, and again today updating from 37 to 38. And nothing went wrong, nothing failed, and everything is working properly.

I find this absolutely amazing, if for no other reason that I know of no other commercial entity (I’m looking at you, Apple) that would provide an operating system that would work as well as Fedora on hardware this old. In today’s world, Linux is a solid solution to keep older computer hardware productively useful long after commercial software won’t.

All the tools are here, and all appear to work. In particular there’s Python 3.11.3, gcc/g++ 13.0.1 and Rust 1.69. I’m surprised that the absolute latest Rust release is available. I was even more surprised when I had dnf install Rust, and it was installed in the local account, in the.cargo folder, just like installing Rust using the script available on the Rust website. I wonder if Fedora will keep it up to date or if I’ll have to run rustup update. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

I’m writing this blog post on the Samsung using Firefox 112.0.1, and it’s doing just fine. My only complaint is with Gnome 44.1. I can use it, but I don’t particularly care for it. In order to get the controls at the top of each window to minimize said window I had to install gnome-tweaks and turn it on accordingly. I’m not going to go to the trouble of installing an alternative DE. Once I’m logged in I live mostly inside terminals, so I can ignore Gnome. Otherwise it’s a high quality distribution and release, and deserves plenty of kudos from the user community.

Links

well, that didn’t go as planned: fedora 36 replaces ubuntu 18.04