On Saturday, November 13, 2010 06:26:09 pm Patrick Bartek wrote:
I've never demeaned Fedora. There are things I don't like to
be sure, but that can be said of all things. I've been using it since FC3 after
trying a dozen or so other distros before settling on it as my primary desktop OS. So that
says something. And I'm VERY particular. It's just that over the years
Fedora's development model and my needs have diverged. And it's time to move on.
I would recommend you take a look at a RHEL6 rebuild when they become available. RHEL6
(and thus the rebuilds) are based off of essentially F12 with some F13 stuff in there, and
you can then have the same setup for five years. Now, when the time does come to upgrade
to, say CentOS 7, you will have a much harder time of it. But if you like what you have,
and you're used to the Fedora tools and setup, either CentOS 6 or Scientific Linux 6,
both in the early stages of building, should fit your bill. SL6 is already available in a
'pre-alpha' form; the pre-alpha meaning that, while the upstream source packages
are stable, the process and binaries built may not be.
You will still be getting quarterly updates that can be more major than you might think;
Red Hat is very good about backporting stuff, but every once in a while it becomes
necessary to do a version upgrade of some package, like Firefox for one, that can cause
more grief than you might think. But, all in all, my experience running CentOS (2.1, 3,
4, and 5) has been very smooth.
The old Red Hat Linux advice was always 'skip the X.0 release, test the X.1 release,
use the X.2 release' but then 7 came along (which most everybody called 7.0), 7.3 came
along (which to many people, was not as stable as 7.2 had been), 8.0 came along, and then
there was 9. The most stable releases of Fedora have always seemed to be the ones right
before a new RHEL, and the least stable the ones right after a new RHEL; this hasn't
been true in a while, although I'll have to admit that going from F8 to F9 tried my
patience; KDE 4 I really didn't need, I was productive in KDE 3.5.10. Enough that I
went Kubuntu 8.04 LTS for a while, but after seeing that the grass wasn't any greener
(in fact, it was browner!) in Kubuntu-land came back with F11, which seemed nice and
solid. And there were quite a few more than the previous three Fedora releases between
RHEL5 and RHEL6.
And I'm now as productive in KDE 4 as I was in 3.5.10. But it did take a while.