Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Booting previous kernels doesn't always work properly though. In the Fedora 10 timeframe (I forget which Fedora release... it was years ago) my notebook constantly had problems with new kernels and Fedora was removing the old kernels. Basically, every 4 out of 5 releases broke my network or graphics. Old kernels weren't kept around and I had to finally figure out that a yum option would let me keep all old kernels forever... that option isn't set by default.

More recently, my F25 installation stopped working after a kernel update. Something to do with the proprietary nvidia driver I was using from rpmfusion - it wouldn't install or would but wouldn't load, or loaded but didn't work - I'm not really sure. Booting to the previous kernel didn't help. The desktop was super super slow - think 60s to move a mouse cursor half-way across the screen. I had to upgrade the entire distro to 26 to get a newer kernel which had working nouveau drivers for my graphics card (a 10-series nvidia card).

In short, relying on previous kernels is dubious at best when we're talking about dodgy drivers. It's a band-aid that doesn't always work and is only understandable by people with a developer's mindset. If Fedora aims to be useful to more than just developers, efforts to avoid breakage are always appreciated.