WHY I WANT TO STOP USING FEDORA!!!

Seann Clark nombrandue at tsukinokage.net
Mon Feb 9 15:54:09 UTC 2009


Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Alan Cox wrote:
>> On Sat, 7 Feb 2009 21:13:21 -0500
>> Mike Chalmers <mikechalmers70 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I do not understand how Fedora expects you to upgrade or reinstall
>>> every 6 months or so.
>>>
>>> This is just not right.
>>>
>>> Should a distro keep continuing to make you install every six months,
>>> if so, I would rather use Microsoft.
>>
>> Feel free. I believe Microsoft solved the problem by labelling the
>> equivalent degree of updating as "service pack" instead of release.
>>
>> However if you want to run the latest stuff it tends to require other
>> latest stuff which in turn ends up updating everything a step.
>>
>> If you want an utterly boring older technology long life setup then you
>> want something like Centos, which backports key fixes over the years
>> rather than adding the latest and greatest.
>>
>> Given you only need to update every year (two releases) and its a 
>> case of
>> shoving a CD in or running the live updater/rebooting it's not a big
>> deal. I've got boxes I managed that started as Red Hat 6 or 7 that are
>> now Fedora 9 or 10 entirely by upgrading. Thats a bit like going Windows
>> 98 to Windows Vista without a reinstall and it works just fine...
>>
> The average user would have no more ability to address the 
> administration issues than to breathe water. You are an uber-admin, 
> and I admit that just a good experienced admin can make upgrades work, 
> but you wind up with suboptimal file layout, in some cases 
> inappropriate file system types, etc.
>
I think with a lot of people who are not die-hard linux users or people 
who like to fix what they (or someone else depending) has broken don't 
have a good time with Fedora. I admit, with me a love hate relationship 
exists between me and Fedora, and a lot of what has been expressed in 
this thread matches both sides of this. I have found over the years that 
Fedora doesn't always play well with certain things, like certain 
flavors of hardware. I spent a year and some months troubleshooting 
problems with a CCTV capture card that I was having using ZoneMinder on 
Fedora 7/8/9.  I upgraded a few times to see if it was fixed in each 
revision, and I didn't want to have to re-build the bttv code from 
source and spin a new kernel, since after all my reviewing it wasn't 
per-say the driver, but a combination of the driver and other portions 
of Fedora. When I moved the card out to a new CentOS5 box, everything 
worked like a dream, without anything more than building ZM from 
scratch. I am rather dissapointed that I couldn't figure out what was 
wrong, but glad to have it working.

    Outside of that the distro's still run most of my home servers, and 
I haven't had an issue with them at all, save for old school playing 
using YUM to upgrade from fedora core 4 to fedora core 5 (wasn't 
recommended, but I wanted to see the results of the upgrade, and I don't 
think I have had a broken install at all while playing with that). A 
feature release update is nice for the most part, save for when 
something like the Radius package updates, and there are changes you 
didn't see originally that drop, and bust the program (that was fun 
though, two bad lines that weren't supported and after they were fixed 
it worked like a charm).


    I think my final note is, if you aren't needing a bleeding edge 
distro, use what the list has suggested already. I know it can be 
confusing for some, since Fedora has a lot of, and used to carry more of 
the RedHat branding, and when RedHat went commercial, I remember finding 
fedora after searching for RHL that was a greater version than 9.0.


~Seann
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