Distro-hunt, maybe.

I'd thought I was done with trying new Linux versions over the Christmas break, but it seems I may not be.

openSUSE 12.3 that has been my mainstay since March 2013 has begun having problems, and moving distros may be the path of least effort to fix it. Libreoffice has begun to save files with truncated filenames, firefox crashes all the time (though thast happens with v26 in several Linux distros) and now after running for a few minutes the screen becomes corrupted with red and grey marks before the system eventually hangs. When openSUSE 13.1 was launched late last year I was very keen to try it, but there were some show-stopping issues with graphics card drivers: while there is a fix, it's not ideal and requires some command line work & fiddling to try to get it running, and I don't really want to go there. I wonder if the infamous graphics card driver bugs have made their way into 12.3 as a trickledown from 13.1?

So I'm considering going back to Sabayon linux, at least for a while, if only I can find a way of turning off LVM (logical volume management) that renders hard drive partitions created this way unreadable from other OSs. I never want to be in a situation again where my most up to date data is on a hard drive that is unreadable because an update broke the OS and the only way to access that data is through that specific OS. Backups yadda yadda yadda, but a backup is never *quite* as current as your data, and having a piece of software *tell* you it's completed a backup isn't the same as actually being able to restore data.

We'll see how this one goes. Sabayon 14.1 is downloading as I type this, to create a live DVD. If it looks good then we'll see. I've created a partition on a second HDD for backing up data to make it globally accessible on my main machine, so tonight I can see a few hundred Gb getting moved across while the PCC meet, ready for a wipe & start again session.