Fedora and long term support [LWN.net]

Fedora and long term support

Posted Oct 19, 2008 2:49 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767)
In reply to: Fedora and long term support by drag
Parent article: Fedora and long term support

"""
As you know there are three main branches of Debian at any one time.. Stable, Testing, and Unstable.
"""

Yes. The Debian Shell Game.

Dialog:

"Debian's old and moldy compared to Distro X".

"No! It's not! It's cutting edge! Use Testing!"

"I couldn't get 'Testing' to install."

"Then try 'Unstable'!"

"OK. Unstable installed, but it has problems 'A', 'B', and 'C'."

"Well, I've just checked and I don't see a bug report from you. Why did you not complete your assignment?"

"I wasn't really thinking of it as an assignment. It's just that everyone was telling me how great Debian was and stuff.

"Well... I still don't see a bug report. You are making me vewwy angwy!!! Try Unstable NOW and file any bug reports!"

But now Linux has trashed my computer. I'm having to post from my girlfriend's Vista box. The word "GRUB" is covering my screen and scrolling up fast. I'm starting to get a little agitated myself.

"Well, it's called "Unstable" for a reason! You should have used stable if you wanted stable! Doofus!"

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Fedora and long term support

Posted Oct 19, 2008 20:53 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> "Well, it's called "Unstable" for a reason! You should have used stable if you wanted stable! Doofus!"

At work I have friends that use Fedora, just because that is what they want to use. The amount of times that he has a non-working box (ie: something he depends on is broken) after a upgrade with Fedora is considerably more often then what I have to deal with on any of my machines.

Fedora and long term support

Posted Oct 19, 2008 21:38 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

"""
At work I have friends that use Fedora, just because that is what they want to use. The amount of times that he has...
"""

Friend or friends? You are not clear on that point. Yes, Fedora breaks a lot. RHEL and CentOS are substantially more reliable. The Fedora guys do play something of a shell game. Nominally, Fedora is Red Hat's alpha, or beta, or whatever you want to call it. Fedora fans will try to trick you into thinking that Fedora is production ready. After all, they are not the ones who have to deal with the problems.

In general, I prefer CentOS. But if my life depended upon OS reliability, and I could only choose between Debian and Fedora... I'd choose Debian. Without the constraints, I'd choose CentOS.

Fedora and long term support

Posted Oct 20, 2008 14:46 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> ....The amount of times that he has a non-working box (ie: something he depends on is broken) after a upgrade with Fedora is considerably more...

Are you referring to upgrades from Fedora X to Fedora X+1 here, or are you referring to the nightly-ish "download and apply the latest set of updated packages to Fedora X"

From my experience, the latter breaking things is quite rare, usually due to an upstream bug, while the former is more common, but at the same time, is to be expected.