Linux distro release cycles, upgrades, etc.

[Jerry Feldman]

I thought I would start a new more generic thread.
In the current landscape, both Fedora and OpenSuSE are "cutting edge" 
releases as well as testing for the respective enterprise editions. This 
is, IMHO, a good thing as many users prefer to get some of the latest 
bells and whistles as well as some stuff that does not go into the 
enterprise builds. This is one reason why I just replaced by CentOS 
desktop system with Fedora 9. Different markets, different expectations. 
Ubuntu has a different philosophy. I don't have any experience upgrading 
Fedora, but I do with SuSE, RHEL, Ubuntu, Tru64 Unix, Ultrix.

My experiences with RHEL (on IA64) were disastrous although in both 
cases experienced system admin people were involved. On my laptop, I've 
upgraded each o the past 3 or 4 releases of Ubuntu with no problems, and 
on my home computer some of my upgrades were upgrade installs of various 
releases of SuSE. I personally prefer and recommend clean installs of an 
OS whether your OS is a Redmond product, Linux, BSD Unix, or Solaris. 
The main issue with clean installs is to make sure your home directories 
are backed up and/or maintained as a separate file system, and that you 
can rebuild the configuration files. But in recent years, system 
configuration on Linux has become easier.

One "distro" whose approach I like is Gentoo because it is essentially a 
continuous upgrade. I initially installed it on my laptop, but my office 
wanted me to use Ubuntu. Quite a while ago I switched rom Debian to SuSE 
because the release cycles were too slow.

-- 
--
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846


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