Why Fedora ?

[David-Paul Niner]

gf durin wrote:

>
>> Why use Fedora? I like it. 3 year support cycle sounds attractive -
>> but to be honest, Linux software is moving at a rate the updating
>> every year or so is highly recommended - at least for the desktop.
>> The new stuff introduced is just worth it, and upgrading is generally
>> pretty painless (especially if /home is a separate partition).
>>
>
> Hmmm, I take this occasion to tell you my experience. Not sure about 
> painless...
> Listen, I decided to move from FC3 to FC4 with my PC at home. Nothing 
> important there (not yet) so I simply put the 4 CDs, and chose the 
> 'upgrade' choice.
>
> Everything seemed to be ok. It copied what it needed, made a  reboot, 
> but when the system started I had no signs of the FC4 kernel. There 
> were some signatures of FC4, but I realized it simply updgraded some 
> rpms, but not the system. A mixture of FC3 and FC4, but... with a lot 
> of errors, and so on. I had to time to fight with it, so I turned to 
> the CDs and meake a fresh Fc4 installation
>
> I feel quite disappointed by this experience. Maybe I did not 
> understand the meaning of 'update', but this is not what I expected.
>
> I think that the way to make linux (more) popular is to be robust 
> against upgrade. I received a message yesterday of the type 'upgrade: 
> no thanks!'
>
> I am sure I still need to discovery something about this stuff, in any 
> case I appreciate your suggestions of this matter
>
> Regards
>
> Gianfranco

Sorry to hear that.

As a rule of thumb I always avoid upgrading operating systems.   Having 
had to administer several boxen upgraded from one version of Windows 
server to another, I know first-hand that the possibilities for disaster 
are enormous.    Fortunatly, in the Linux world, upgrading (for me 
anyway), has always been a matter of nfs mounting a remote /home 
directory.   Obviously, the same could be achieved with a local drive 
(and doing thorough backups!).

You may want to give it a try sometime.

Later,
David-Paul Niner



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