Since everyone else is chiming in ...
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 02:55:35PM -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
On 05/11/2015 10:16 AM, Tethys wrote:
>On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 5:53 PM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203(a)freenet.de> wrote:
>
>>>>The problem is that newer versions tend to break everything, which
>>>>makes for a sucky end user experience. I've been doing this since
Red
>>>>Hat 3.0.3 and up, so it's not as if this is all new to me.
>>
>>Well, I guess you are aware that RHL/RHEL never supported upgrading? In
>>Fedora, upgrading is supposed to work.
>
>It's not the upgrading process that's the problem. It's that the newer
>software tends to be broken in anything but the default configuration.
>I upgraded my girlfriend's desktop to F21 and it's literally unusable
>now. She has to use her laptop instead (which is also barely usable
>due to unwanted UI changes forced onto end users). Modern Linux is
>becoming like Apple - "we know what's best for you, and if you don't
>like that, you're wrong".
I don't agree. My F21 boxes are ANYTHING but default and they work just
fine. They're part desktop, part server, part development systems,
part experimental hamsters, part whatever-the-h*ll-I-need-at-the-
moment. You get the idea. Granted, it took some work to get them
working like _I_ want them (and I'm a nerd), but they do work well and
they're all fedups from F20.
My current work laptop has been upgraded since F19 to F21 (the one
before that F14 to F20). I compile from source several things like my
editor, email client, email indexer, run Firefox nightlies, and many
others. On top of that, I use two different HEAD versions of the data
analysis framework ROOT, and yet I have had only minor issues during
upgrades.
That being said, I did do a raw install of F20 on a couple of them
because they were updated from F16 up to F18 or F19. Many things
My home server has been upgraded starting from F10 to F20[1] over the
years, and survived without significant problems. Mind you that
includes big changes like, unstable pulseaudio, RPM changing checksum
algorithms (does anyone remember which release was that?), systemd,
usr-move. Although I have to admit, I dodged Gnome 3 since I have been
an XFCE user since much before that.
The first year or so I used preupgrade, but soon switched to just using
`yum --releasever=N' followed by distro-sync. The journey couldn't have
been smoother. In fact my colleagues on Macs have had more problems
with upgrades! I say job well done to the Fedora project.
Footnotes:
[1] I stopped at F20 as I wanted to have at least one computer with
pdftk on it.
--
Suvayu
Open source is the future. It sets us free.