Major or minor change? [LWN.net]

Major or minor change?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 16:42 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137)
Parent article: Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

From the article:

Fear of change. Fedora is a major change, an evolution of the much trusted original Red Hat Linux.

This is confusing: the term "evolution" is usually used to indicate gradual change, and doesn't really make sense following the phrase "major change" just ahead of it.

So is Fedora Core 1 a major or minor change from Red Hat Linux 9?

Reading the release notes, I'd have to say it's a minor change. There are no significant package deletions other than the LPRng print system, so a sysadmin moving from RH9 to FC1 would not find this to be a difficult upgrade. Despite the changes in the development model, not much has really changed as of yet -- the majority of the work is still done by RH developers. The life span is changed from ~2 releases a year to 2-3 releases a year, which is not that big of a change either. And you can still download the ISO images from the Redhat FTP site. Probably the biggest change is the name and version number.

Having said all that, I should mention that I use Debian. :^) Try it, you'll probably like it once you get past the installation process.

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