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Fedora does have a short support cycle for older distributions (two releases + 1 month?). Thus you'll need to upgrade pretty soon.

Unfortunately that's the status of Linux desktop right now. However if you're a little bit adventurous there is much to gain.

I call foul on that. The Fedora-style forced upgrade treadmill is certainly *not* the status of the Linux desktop today. It is the status of Fedora. Period.

Other distros typically provide for at least 18 months of support, as opposed to Fedora's 13 months. And a number of solid and respected Linux distros give you anywhere from 3 years to 7+ years of support.

I don't believe that any Linux distro provides for a shorter maximum life-cycle than does Fedora.

And as an administrator of Linux business desktops, I am actually finding less and less advantage in upgrading to the latest. The Linux desktop is already pretty much there for me and my users. The main problem today being third party issues like IE only web apps.

Edited 2009-11-17 18:05 UTC

I think he was probably thinking of Ubuntu and their 6 month upgrade for non LTS releases.

Ubuntu's support policy for non-LTS releases is, and has always been, 18 months.

3 years for the LTS desktop. And 5 years for the LTS server.

Edited 2009-11-17 18:37 UTC

Unfortunately, their LTS releases mean nothing. They are exactly the same as the six monthly releases that they try and make a commitment on 'supporting', but it largely depends on the resources and community support available. When you have a Firefox beta in your LTS distribution for five years you know there is a problem. It's funny. People complained about the confusion of KDE 4.0 as to what distributors wre shipping, and yet when something is explicitly labelled as a beta it goes in anyway.

Ubuntu is exactly like other distributions. If you want the latest 'supported' software in your distribution then the only way to get it is to upgrade. Bug fixes? The only way to get them is to upgrade. You end up getting sucked along with the release cycle anyway.

Edited 2009-11-18 13:56 UTC

How many distributions provide anything beyond security/major bugfixes for old releases, such as driver/kernel feature backports and new software versions when merited?

RHEL/CentOS and SLE definitely do, and Ubuntu LTS seems to as well. For example, RHEL 5 uses a (heavily patched) 2.6.18 kernel, yet has new & improved drivers, ext4, KVM, etc. RHEL 4 has a package for Firefox 3, even though it won't build using the included library versions in RHEL 4.

I've been using Fedora since the beginning (and Red Hat Linux before that), and I fully agree, Fedora seems to have the shortest maximum life-cycle of any major Linux distribution. To be fair, that is by design and well-documented. I like running the latest and greatest, so I upgraded to the latest Rawhide this morning. Nothing apparently broken yet, other than the nouveau driver (which is just broken on my hardware and has been since at least Fedora 11). I also have working copies of both Fedora 12 and Fedora 11 on my hard drive, just in case. Not the way I'd run an enterprise, but it works for me.

Yes, that is what diskspace (and rysnc, tgz, whatever) is for. :-)

I wonder if it's possible to intercept with a proxy those IE only web apps and change the offending CSS and JS...

I don't feel under sufficient threat to be forced to upgrade even if the updates stop. Then I'll just have (what I consider) a stable OS.

Saying that I bet I install something newer just out of interest before the end of 2010 anyway.

The problem with using Fedora, non-LTS Ubuntu, and maybe OpenSUSE is that there is always a compelling reason to upgrade: continued support. You've got maybe seven months to go on Fedora 11.

A Fedora version is unsupported approximately 13 months after release. After that, no more updates. How well are Fedora/non-LTS Ubuntu releases supported in the period between the new version being released and the end of support? Do they get anything besides security/major bug fixes? Do they get kernel upgrades / backports? How well do upgrades work when skipping between versions?

Since Linux drivers are often only provided for the latest or recent mainline kernel version(s), one may have to upgrade, rebuild parts of the system, or backport drivers if they change hardware / need improved drivers. And after a few years, new software might not work with old dependencies. (For example, Firefox 3 won't build out-of-the-box using the libraries included with RHEL 4.)

I personally use CentOS to avoid these problems - Red Hat provide updates for years, and backports drivers and fixes.

I doubt RedHat supports CentOS unless you pay them too.

My guess is they usually only support RHEL.

I doubt RedHat supports CentOS unless you pay them too. My guess is they usually only support RHEL.

Well, it seems in this discussion 'support' is shorthand for 'patch and security support'. I don't think anyone was implying RH is supporting CentOS in the trouble-ticket sense. In any case, CentOS 5 will be 'security supported' until March 2014, which is a longest available right now (I think).

Until April 2014 (said the nitpicker). March 31, 2014 is the official date.

I thought they had extended this due to the planned 12 month delay in releasing RHEL6. (Rahul?) But it would not surprise me if Red Hat ended up postponing that flag day for a while. Red Hat is top notch in consideration for their customers. As is the CentOS team. Though I am a bit annoyed at their (Red Hat's) breaking their 18-24 month promise. Predictability was one of the nice things about the RHEL/CentOS release schedule. Some of us "enterprise" admins *do* care about having the option to upgrade at reasonable intervals.

Edited 2009-11-17 19:47 UTC

While I do agree that RHEL 6 is long over-due. (Especially if you use it as a workstation), in RedHat's defense, a lot of resources were invested in making 5.3 and 5.4 more competitive with recent distributions - anything from new(er) Firefox, evolution to backported network stack changes, updated drivers and KVM support.

Hopefully RHEL is right around the corner. (And with it, more blood into the EPEL project)

- Gilboa

Firstly, as someone who has administered business desktops using both Fedora and non-LTS Ubuntu, I would not lump them into the same category. Both do get security and bug fixes. Fedora takes a rather cavalier attitude regarding kernel upgrades. Over the (short) lifetime of a Fedora release, one might see 3 major kernel upgrades. For example, Fedora 8 was released with 2.6.23. 2.6.24, 2.6.25, and 2.6.26 crashed our XDMCP server about once a week, bringing down about 70 users. (Yes, I gave each version a try. All Fedora kernels killed it right up to the point at which we switched to another distro.)

Ubuntu (non-LTS) takes a more conservative approach. If the distro releases with, say, 2.6.31, then 2.6.31 is what it will be for the 18 months that the version is supported. As an admin I find this to be a blessing. I'm uncertain whether drivers are added over the life of the kernel. I suspect they are. But I don't care that much about that in this use case.

The Fedora update pipeline is a firehose. Ubuntu's updates are much more controlled. I get the impression that you might feel that continued, aggressive updates are always a good thing. The admin in me shudders at that thought. But it also shudders a bit at the idea of being stuck with old tools for extended periods, which is why I use CentOS judiciously, and not for everything.

Non-LTS releases don't get new drivers AFAIK and I am not sure that even LTS releases do get a lot of backports. Red Hat and Novell certainly do a lot more in that regard.

Any Ubuntu kernels devs around that can correct me?

No reason to upgrade? Why miss the fun of borking your wireless and destroying your xorg.conf settings? Even better Flash will work *worse* once you upgrade.

Which only goes to show that every cloud has a silver lining. Would it be too much to hope that in the next release it won't work at all? Yes, I suppose it would be...

"That's the first time I've felt this way since I started dabbling in Linux 6 years ago. I'm actually content. That's been a long time coming but, from my own personal perspective, is a good sign that the Linux desktop has come of age."

You took the words right out of my mouth!

kragil: you're basically right, but rather exaggerating. We use xz at a low compression level for the deltas, and the CPU intensity isn't as high as you imply. It's actually faster than downloading even on my very weedy Vaio P.

Well, on every machine I ran Fedora (which I don't anymore) the heavy usage of the disk when applying updates really got on my nerves.

TBH I think Suses Delta-RPM (which Fedora now after a few years adopted) is a second-rate solution. Googles Courier patches are much nicer. I hope .deb based distros will skip this regenerating of packages idea and go right to a good solution. ( .. maybe ChromeOS will .. nobody (outside Google) knows .. )

when were you testing? for quite a while during the f12 rawhide cycle, deltas were using high xz compression, which was rather CPU-intensive. it was changed to use a lower compression level rather later in the cycle. you may have already given up by then.

edit: I see by your later reply you were basing your experience on f11. yes, things are different in f12, please do not judge based on f11 experience.

Edited 2009-11-17 18:23 UTC

OK, so the delta can now be applied right away? I thought you needed to generate the original RPM for security checks? Or is that now done completely in RAM? Convince me that it is now a sane solution and I might try it again.

Debian updates work very well as they are now, there is no reason to mess with aptitude at all.

Debian's superb package management is one of the reasons that I moved to it years ago, as at the time, Fedora's was a mess. They've been trying to fix it forever,a nd this is just another attempt.

"They've been trying to fix it forever,a nd this is just another attempt."

What do you mean by 'this'?

I really don't get the big hoohaa over package management. Took me about two days to switch from urpmi to yum. Figured out what the equivalent commands were and it was fine. I don't sit there with a stopwatch figuring out which is faster, they both get the job done. *shrug*

Fedora updates not only consume far more bandwidth and time, but break the system far more often due to their extreme volume. The Fedora folks are trying to address the time and bandwidth issue with Presto, with results which remain to be evaluated, but have pretty much ignored the real problem of cavalierly issuing massive volumes of updates from a large number of third parties, who implement widely varying degrees of QA quality. They simply trust the third parties on their users' behalf, and call it "staying close to upstream". Breakage that trades processor for banwidth is still breakgage.

Please don't presume to answer for the person I was actually talking to. He was talking about package management, not update policies.

If Jake objects he'll tell me so. In the mean time, have you any objections to addressing my concerns?

It has nothing to do with speed of updates, so much as the entire rpm system. At the time I switched, Apt had much better dependency tracking, and the Debian repositories kick ass, the system just worked better.

What exactly do you mean by 'better dependency tracking'?

I mean exactly what I said, apt tracks dependencies better.

I had to even register to this site,
to give U the offical "rpm-expert"-prize.

I.e. every time there is a story about RH/Fedora,
in OSnews, there is some "expert" to talk about rpm and dependency management.

...when rpm has nothing to do with it.

-> yum yum.. Debian this and apt that...

Since the last time I used Debian was with floppies maybe in 1998??, I don't now write any expert comments about Debian, better leave it to somebody who manages 50+ Debian servers...

In my experience, there is nothing wrong with dependency tracking in rpm. If you use malformed packages or repos with incompatible dependencies things go wrong but that would happen in the deb world as well. To most people this is a no issue if you stick with well known reposositories, and that is the case regardless if you use yum or apt.


A much bigger problem that we have two dominant non compatible packaging systems. This means that developer effort to package a certain package doubles. This means that the developer is likely to have less time available to test that his package works well on the target system.

It also means that the developer needs time to learn both systems. In the end this means that many programs only gets packaged for one of the packaging systems, resulting in less available software for the end user, and a lesser customer base for the software manufacturer.

Lesser customer base often means less profit. Less profit means that it is less likely that the package gets ported to Linux in the first place, and again the loser is the Linux end user.

Today you need to be able to install rpm to support Linux Standards Base. Debian complies with this by using Alien. However Alien is far too difficult to use to most end users, so if you are software house you still need to create both debian and rpms to support both Red Hat and Debian. In my opinion Debian does the Linux world a disservice in not adopting the standard packaging format.

If Debian switched to rpm as packagin format, their repositories would still kick ass, as they are done by very brilliant people, and they could still use apt-get and other tools that their users know and like, but the job for developers that would like to support both Debian and Red Hat would be much easier.

In the end that would result in a better business proposition for people considering porting their apps to Linux, and in the end this would be a good thing for the Linux user in general, regardless if he use Debian or some Red Hat based distro.

I don't find alien hard to use. I'm not sure how it could be that hard to use.

A firehose is a firehose. Oh... you can compress the stream however you want. Or you can separate out only the new breakage, and send that compressed, to be combined with the original good stuff and old, unfixed, breakage on the client side. But the end result has the same problems, plus any new problems introduced by the shiny new delivery system. The churn problem is preserved by the process, and made worse by something akin to the second law of thermodynamics.

I'm sure that your Debian's updates are better than Fedoras. But pretty much any distro's updates are. We've all simply escaped in different directions.

Edited 2009-11-17 23:09 UTC

Oh, I'm not arguing that at all, just puttin' in my 2 cents worth.

I will agree to your every word. yum is hell and so is RPM. I also moved from Fedora/Redhat to debian due to the same reason. People who wants to know the difference between yum and apt-get or synaptic please read the link below:
http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7382/1.html

Don't spread FUD. When was the last time you tried Fedora? The benchmarks you link to doesn't even measure the same things. If you want to benchmark yum, refer to

http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/yum-benchmarks/

Edited 2009-11-18 09:25 UTC

I give you one thing that bothers me about apt. "Reading database..." takes forever.

Having fun trolling?

- Gilboa

This is not a troll, this is what my experience with Fedora has been. If that is what defines trolling nowadays, so be it.

Lets do an English 101:



Unless you spent the last couple of weeks using Fedora 12 (How exactly? It was released... Yesterday?), you have no way of defining Fedora 12 as "just another attempt"...

- Gilboa

Edited 2009-11-18 14:11 UTC

No, but I did try Fedora 11, and Fedora 9, and I saw no real improvement over what Debian gives me, or what I had to deal with when I did use Fedora.

Not true. Even on a fairly high bandwidth connection, yum-presto is definitely faster for me at work.

Then you probably have fast machines. On Netbooks or old computers presto sucks big fat donkey dong and I am _not_ exaggerating. Downloading with a fast line is basically effortless. Regenerating the RPMs isn't and it basically just froze my netbook (EeePC 901)

Nope. Using Fedora 12 on a regular laptop as well as a netbook. EEEPC, in fact.

OK, maybe your Netbook as a fast SSD or F12 presto improved over F11 tenfold. Trust me F11 presto sucked on my netbook and somehow I think it didn't change all that much or did it?

I would rather wait a few minutes for updates being applied than have to download over 100MB of patches for something like Open office.

It would also be cool if this type of update works for upgrading between major versions of the distributions. For example if you have installed all the current updates for Fedora 11 you could delta upgrade to Fedora 12 (And non delta packages used when delta is not possible).

It all really depends on the speed of your machine, but as far as I'm concerned presto had been a big help. I no longer cringe at 300-400Mb of updates.

the 'miscellaneous problems' entries on the common bugs page are catch-alls copy/pasted straight over from the f11 page; basically they're just standard bits of advice for configuration tweaking for people who do run into X issues. there are _always_ some X issues in any distro release, just too much hardware to support it all perfectly. In general F12 should have rather better graphics experiences for most users than F11.

Ah. O.K. Thanks.

No. Not at all. It's just a 4.3GB DVD image. Even if you are on a modem connection, that's only about 11 to 13 days. By then there will only be about a half a gig of updates out. With the new delta-rpms you can go through those less than a day and a half.

Of course, if you pay by the MB, you want to be careful. Fedora's price tag on my netbook with mobile broadband comes in at about $300 with the initial updates.

No. Not at all. It's just a 4.3GB DVD image. Even if you are on a modem connection, that's only about 11 to 13 days. By then there will only be about a half a gig of updates out. With the new delta-rpms you can go through those less than a day and a half.

Of course, if you pay by the MB, you want to be careful. Fedora's price tag on my netbook with mobile broadband comes in at about $300 with the initial updates. "

FUD. a Live CD is only around 700 megs.

Even if you do install the DVD and decide to install everything, with DeltaRPM, even 500 megs of updates will probably go down to maybe 50 megs - so the feature is invaluable to users on such connections, unlike how you were suggesting earlier.

and due to Delta RPM and ALSO due to the existence of installable live cd's that are around 700 megs, I am begining to wonder wether you are really trolling?

um...no. You can download a 650MB live CD, if you like.

Installable?

Of course. All you had to do was visit the download page to see all this, it's not exactly rocket science.

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

The first DVD is all you need, especially if you upgrading from F11. The DVD is actually smaller now.

I'm a bit more pragmatic, I suppose. I would hesistate to congratulate a distro for "another great release" until I had installed it and experienced its wonders and/or horrors for myself.

hey, it's my distro of choice and has been since the first release of Fedora came about in November 2003,

I've used every release since the betas of Yarrow and to me they've all been Great releases, I see no reason for that distinguished reputation to be tarnished now, and once again I congratulate the team on a great job of keeping Fedora alive and kicking and producing another great release. I'm sure of it.

cheers
niall

Edited 2009-11-17 22:27 UTC

Well, I rode that train from Red Hat 4.2 (Biltmore) in Spring 1997 through Fedora 8 (Werewolf), released November 2007. It started to jump the track with FC1, Yarrow, but I refused to admit it. By Fedora 7, aptly named "Moonshine". things became completely untenable.

When I hear of another Fedora release, I tend not to think "Another Great Release!" but "Better thee than me!".

Edited 2009-11-17 22:36 UTC

I'm afraid desktop effects may have to wait awhile with this release. Due to something that NVidia did with the drivers where it kills usability with KDE users the Fedora 12 team decided to leave them out.

At least, that's what it says on their common F12 bugs page.

If you're okay with the open source driver, then by all means have a blast. It's a really great release otherwise.

edit: spelling

Edited 2009-11-18 09:48 UTC

Common bugs page talks about an issue with the proprietary Nvidia driver. Details at

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs#Problems_when_using_t...

Fedora will not ever ship any proprietary kernel drivers. However it is available in the updates-testing repository in RPM Fusion repository if you want to use it. Details at

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-November/m...

There's always GNOME. On the other hand, GNOME isn't everyone's cup of tea. I'm using compiz with the nvidia driver, and desktop effects seem to be working just fine.

right, because wobbly windows and spinning cubes are so helpful in getting shit done.

So you don't like special effects? So what?

Go back to your green-screen VT100 terminal.