Okay, for the first time in my life I'm a distro whore. I'm now running Fedora again on my development laptop (replacing Edgy). Why the switch so soon?:
- RPMs from CVS are easier to make than DEBs in my opinion.
- I've found out you can run synaptic (and apt-get) on Fedora.
- I found myself looking on google to do things with Ubuntu that I know by heart for Fedora.
- A clean init system that I can understand and tweak.
- Signal to noise ratio. The Redhat guys are easy to talk to and there is a minimal amount of noise on the mailing lists and IRC.
- I can use custom DKMS ipw3945 and nvidia packages so my custom kernels can work automatically with binary-shitty drivers.
- Black magic. I'm doing lots of work with development versions of the kernel, PolicyKit, HAL and X and I need a clean environment. Ubuntu has lots of black magic, which is great from a “just works” perspective but bad when you are trying to hack on core bits of the stack.
Don't get me wrong, I still think Edgy is great, and would wholeheartedly recommend it for someone new to Linux. For me, Fedora is just right.
You're right… lots of magic going on in Ubuntu. About your first point, have you tried `checkinstall`? I haven't used it myself, but supposedly it will make debs or rpms by watching make and make install.