On Friday, January 21, 2011 11:01:01 am Les Mikesell wrote:
> The first few RHEL releases sort of looked like the same
> pattern where there would be 2 fedora versions replacing the X.0, X.1
> RH's with the 3rd in the set being RHEL, but it didn't stay that way
> very long and quickly got to the point where is wasn't worth even
> testing on fedora because things would just be completely different in
> the next release and there was no effort to maintain hardware
> compatibility or user data across the upgrades - or sometimes even for
> minor updates.
My experience has been considerably different, and I have found Fedora, especially recently, has been more stable than the non-LTS Ubuntu, at least for KDE usage. Once you got past the first release with KDE4, but that happened during my two-year excursion into disappointing KUbuntu-land. I'm told that going from the last KDE3 to the first KDE4 wasn't pleasant; but that was/is just as true with Ubuntu, excepting for the fact that Ubuntu waited just a little longer to go there.
I have also seen CentOS (and by extension the upstream) kernels break things, reorder ethernet ports, etc.
> And before someone else points it out, I know RH8 and RH9 didn't use the
> .0 minor number (perhaps to avoid the buggy connotation) but they were
> really more fedora-like and broke more things than users had come to
> expect in the the RH tradition.
Technically this isn't true. I'm looking at my shelf of boxed sets, and the first one without a .0 was 7. I don't still have my box for RH8, but I do actually have a machine running with RH8....
# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Linux release 8.0 (Psyche)
I distinctly remember the .0 being there on the box. Some thought, at the time, that RHL7.3 should have been labeled 8.0; RHAS2.1 IIRC is/was based off RHL7.2.
But RH 9 was just that; no .0 there. RH only kept up the .0 .1 .2 consistently through 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x; 7 and later were a different beast, and 3.03 and prior were as well. There were more major versions that didn't do that than did. :-)
Ubuntu folk have just as many problems; I do support for a couple who use Linux exclusively, and they have a mix of boxes, including an F13, a Ubuntu 8.04, and Ubuntu 9.04, and a Ubuntu 6.06. The upgrade from 6.06 on up is not going to be pleasant.
The Ubuntu 9.04 was upgraded to 9.10, and many things broke. I mean, just flat out broke. Sound stopped. Video output stopped. Wireless stopped. On a Dell notebook with Linux support, that shipped with Ubuntu installed.
In contrast, I returned to Fedora at F11, and haven't had major issues with moving from 11 to 12 to 13 to 14. In fact, the 13 to 14 experience was rather smooth, particularly for bleeding edge.
But that's what Fedora is; bleeding edge, and if that's what you need, that's what you need.
Your mileage (and breakage) may vary.
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