Nouvea? Retch.

I often wonder what heinous crimes I committed in a previous existence to deserve the punishments I get in this one.

It all started so simply.

My Desktop was running PCLinuxos11 - a bit long in the tooth and still 32 bit, but it was all working and I kept up with the patches. But then at the last round of patches, the Chromium browser stopped working - a broken dependency. I try to fix the dependancy - but get a 404 from the respository. I trid to revert but can no longer find the previous package. Oh well, I bite the bullet and try to do a dist upgrade - which completely trashes my machine.

First I try installing PCLinuxOS14 - but it uninstalls all of KDE (but I still have openbox which I added some time ago to play around with). Then I try OpenSuse (I used to run Suse on my servers up to about version 8) the current version looks nice and it all works but OMG is it SLOW! And it also trashes the PCLInuxOS installation completely! Then I try MINT 17 - which won't even boot. Then I find an old MINT 15 DVD which boots OK and I install that, mount my /home filesystem and recreate the accounts. I roll forward the patches, and I seem to have a working (and usable system). Only I can't install any more software as it seems this version of the distro is no longer supported.

Why is this stuff so hard? I know you guys don't want to maintain lots of different versions of your software, but is it so hard to just leave the old packages online and let us upgrade through them? 

After a lot more digging it seems that my graphics card (Nvidia GeForce 6150) does not play nice with recent versions of the nouveau driver. Hence my only option is to hope that the nVidia supplied versions will work with whatever flavour Linux I try next - which I need to boot up and install with the nouveau driver blacklisted. But for a short while I think I'll stick with having a working computer.