Fedora 18 Is Now One Month Behind Schedule

[t0ken]

Rolling updates is just a completely different release model from stable releases. You can't really say one is 'better' than the other, each has advantages and drawbacks. No major RH customer would want a rolling release version of RHEL, for instance. Stable releases provide a sysadmin with an assurance that the system will, basically, work the same way throughout its lifetime. Rolling updates do not allow this. By their nature there will be 'regular' system updates that cause massive changes to system behaviour and may require significant manual care and feeding. This is great for a geek enthusiast, it is not much use for a stable deployment.

Personally I think the rolling release model might make a deal of sense for Fedora and it'd be interesting to try it, but it's certainly not the case that rolling release is simply 'better' than stable releases. It's good for some use cases, terrible for others.

Fedora already has a minimal installation option. At present it installs around 200 packages and uses 770MB of disk space (F18). There's some discussion on the devel list at present as to how some core components could possibly be split up to make a minimal install more space efficient.

Wow, a response from the great AdamW! I started using Linux at the tail-end of your time with Mandriva (v. 2009 was my first Linux distro and is what I learned with). Just find it kinda cool that we're actually having a dialogue, lol.

I certainly agree with your take on rolling vs. stable releases. In fact I'd love it if Fedora released a longterm supported version (similar to Ubuntu's LTS), so that I know I won't have to reinstall my system at some point in the near(-ish) future, but even that is non-existent. And it's not even the fact that I have to reinstall, b/c even that isn't entirely true with the pre-upgrade feature (though, I guess that's been taken out for something built from the ground up?). Idk, I guess it's just that Arch fits what I want to do with my system more closely than Fedora. And I don't mean to bash Fedora at all, and in fact I don't mean to insinuate that rolling is "better" than stable release cycles. Everyone has their preference and everyone should use what fits them best, be that Windows, *nix or OSX...I don't think their can be a "best" OS. It's just too subjective. I personally like the rolling release cycle better and would likely use Fedora if there was a spin with that feature.

Interesting, I'd love to see where that ends up (re: stripping more out of the minimal spin).

[AdamW]

we can't really do a 'spin' of Fedora with a completely different update model, it's too big a difference. spins are just different collections of packages from the release-time package set, fundamentally. you can't use the 'spins' model to have a different branch of Fedora with a completely different update policy, it doesn't scale that far.

I don't think we could have both a rolling release 'stable' Fedora and a stable release Fedora, it's essentially maintaining two different distributions and we don't have the dev resources for that. One of the reasons I think the rolling release model might be interesting for Fedora (to be clear this is a personal opinion and I'm not on any of the major Fedora boards or committees, there is no suggestion that this will actually _happen_, it's just me shootin' the breeze) is actually that we barely have the resources to support two or three stable releases at a time anyhow, and a rolling release model reduces the support burden quite considerably. If we were going to do it it'd probably only make sense to just switch.

BTW, you can kind of hack up a rolling release model with Fedora as it is, that's what I do on my desktop. It's not real pretty but it more or less works. I installed my system with F15, then when F16 Alpha came out, I yum upgraded to that, stuck on F16 till F17 Alpha came out, yum upgraded to that, and so on. The upgrade to Alpha can be a bit rocky and you can get some instability until the Beta comes out, but it's viable if you don't mind fixing things up now and again.

On an LTS release, the problem is really the same as the release model thing - resources. Supporting a release for a long time takes considerable resources and Fedora just doesn't have those. There's really nothing at all to stop it happening if people wanted to make it happen, this has been the case for years - all it would take is a group of people to step up and say they'll act as the long-term maintenance team, porting security fixes back to packages that are three or four years old. So far, no-one wants to do that, and corporate sponsors like RH don't see any value in paying anyone to do it. So it doesn't happen. If someone did step up, though, it could happen.

[drago01]

I know this won't happen but I wish they would readjust the schedule and ship fedora 18 with the 3.7 kernel... they would be so far ahead of the competition it wouldn't even be funny

Fedora does get kernel updates during its lifetime. Fedora 17 uses 3.6.1 now and will likely get 3.7 as well. Chances are that F18 will get 3.8 as well.

[Hamish Wilson]

Personally, I have no real reason to care as long as it is out before January, as I have certain other commitments that need to be followed before I can get my hands on some necessary hardware to do the upgrade. So it looks like I will be jumping ship from Fedora 16 right about the time it's support cycle is up, which I really do not mind as for the most part Fedora 16 has been running great for me. I am looking forward to Kernel 3.6, Xfce 4.10, Gimp 2.8, and a few other version upgrades I have been waiting on though. Still, I would much rather have the next version just work when I jump to it than have it be out before I would logically need it anyway, and the Fedora team seems to understand this.

[r1348]

who cares how long they take to release it? I'm using it right now and it's the best linux ever made.

fedora is linux for pros and all the others are compiled with aids and fail


I know this won't happen but I wish they would readjust the schedule and ship fedora 18 with the 3.7 kernel... they would be so far ahead of the competition it wouldn't even be funny

elementary looks all pretty and gay but kernel 3.2 LOLOL, they are going to release a 3.2 kernel based distro in december or january 2013...

all ubuntu based distros are cancer.

what fedora needs is a software center and less anal about repos etc

Are you 12?

[disi]

Rolling updates is just a completely different release model from stable releases. You can't really say one is 'better' than the other, each has advantages and drawbacks. No major RH customer would want a rolling release version of RHEL, for instance. Stable releases provide a sysadmin with an assurance that the system will, basically, work the same way throughout its lifetime. Rolling updates do not allow this. By their nature there will be 'regular' system updates that cause massive changes to system behaviour and may require significant manual care and feeding. This is great for a geek enthusiast, it is not much use for a stable deployment.

Personally I think the rolling release model might make a deal of sense for Fedora and it'd be interesting to try it, but it's certainly not the case that rolling release is simply 'better' than stable releases. It's good for some use cases, terrible for others.

Fedora already has a minimal installation option. At present it installs around 200 packages and uses 770MB of disk space (F18). There's some discussion on the devel list at present as to how some core components could possibly be split up to make a minimal install more space efficient.

Those are the 'oldest' RedHat based machines we have (CentOS 4.9):
Linux XXXX.siemens.de 2.6.9-101.ELsmp #1 SMP Thu Jul 21 17:28:56 EDT 2011 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

They are still going strong

[Pallidus]

Rigaldo I have nothing but love for elementary, I have been downloading and using the daily isos from that italian site for ages now.

You are absolutely right about the pantheon or whatever they call that DE being the best one available on linux, it's fast, it's beautiful and it's very functional.

It's smart and well designed...

now their decision to create a bunch of new apps from the ground up, like noise (correct me if I'm wrong), will delay their release ad nauseam


As far as I know the daily isos work but they are not even alpha, are they?

meaning they have at least 4/6 months before they release a final version, so for all intents and purposes they will release a ubuntu 12.04 based distro with kernel 3.2 when most likely ubuntu 13.04 will be available, they will be one year behind the curve.

when you think about it linux users care more about stuff like having an updated system and security than pretty DE's, and I doubt there will be mac or win users switching over to elementary because it looks good.


IMO they should have released pantheon as a standalone DE for the major distros and with pantheon and cinnamon gnome and kde would finally take the lower stage

[bug77]

Rolling updates is just a completely different release model from stable releases. You can't really say one is 'better' than the other, each has advantages and drawbacks. No major RH customer would want a rolling release version of RHEL, for instance. Stable releases provide a sysadmin with an assurance that the system will, basically, work the same way throughout its lifetime. Rolling updates do not allow this. By their nature there will be 'regular' system updates that cause massive changes to system behaviour and may require significant manual care and feeding. This is great for a geek enthusiast, it is not much use for a stable deployment.

Personally I think the rolling release model might make a deal of sense for Fedora and it'd be interesting to try it, but it's certainly not the case that rolling release is simply 'better' than stable releases. It's good for some use cases, terrible for others.

Fedora already has a minimal installation option. At present it installs around 200 packages and uses 770MB of disk space (F18). There's some discussion on the devel list at present as to how some core components could possibly be split up to make a minimal install more space efficient.

Still, there could be a case where Fedora is turned into a rolling release and RHEL stays in its current form.
Then again, everything gets updates anyway, thus blurring the line somewhat.

[blackiwid]

yeah one more reason to not use this distribution, I tried it, thought yes ok they use rpm I hate that, but its one of the big distributions and the quality must be at the same level or nearly the same level than ubuntu is. So I bit in the sour apple (dont argue about it its not my main point here) to use it despite the rpm problem.

I had to find out that they dont have a user-friendly update-mechanism, heck even in debian its more easy to update, and in the wiki stands the recommend way to update is to reinstall really??? rofl.

You soon notice that 1. it suffers from very few users or from a different goal than releasing a good linux version, there is not the focus of fedora, its a testing field so that they can make their real linux better with the bugreports from the users or whatever, because of that they not postpone their release to get it more stable, they are more bleeding edge and they make no secret about it. You cant really claim that they are more bleeding edge + more stable. Then their bubtracker, they do not even react there to send bugs.

I found at least one reallly really bug, a show stopper. they did have a buggy driver of my usb-soundcard, not a cheap noname a better one... so this card works in arch in ubuntu but not in fedora, ok can maybe happen but then you react to bugreports to such stuff..

So they have several big big show stoppers, no working safe dist-upgrade system, and this later releases are also a big problem and shows that their developer base must be really bad because they go the old route of releasing when a fixed feature-set is done. that does not work well, the best release shedule (besides rolling release) is release early release often. Why because 99% of the users will not use the alpha or beta, so they dont get much user reports. But I guess they can just not bring the release in such a stable way like ubuntus releases are most of the time a few buggy versions with unity where there ok that was a big mistake but if look over that its pretty stable, not perfekt but good enough. a somewhat good compromise for many people between stable and bleeding edge stuff.

I really wanted to like fedora, because I love gnome-shell and I dont like some desitions of canonical. I also dont like arch much, think their package tools have bad interfaces. they look like 1990 tools or so... even portage has a better interface but is really slow sadly. and debian is even in unstable just to old they have even today no current gnome packages in experimental... so I am a bit stuck without really want to stay on ubuntu, but the alternatives are so bad. heck even opensuse without having a big compony with unbelivalbe much money behind it like as example fedora seems to have better quality. but then again I dont like it too

btw in ubuntu even the alpha versions of the next verison I dont have any hardware issues.

[disi]

yeah one more reason to not use this distribution, I tried it, thought yes ok they use rpm I hate that, but its one of the big distributions and the quality must be at the same level or nearly the same level than ubuntu is. So I bit in the sour apple (dont argue about it its not my main point here) to use it despite the rpm problem.

I had to find out that they dont have a user-friendly update-mechanism, heck even in debian its more easy to update, and in the wiki stands the recommend way to update is to reinstall really??? rofl.

You soon notice that 1. it suffers from very few users or from a different goal than releasing a good linux version, there is not the focus of fedora, its a testing field so that they can make their real linux better with the bugreports from the users or whatever, because of that they not postpone their release to get it more stable, they are more bleeding edge and they make no secret about it. You cant really claim that they are more bleeding edge + more stable. Then their bubtracker, they do not even react there to send bugs.

I found at least one reallly really bug, a show stopper. they did have a buggy driver of my usb-soundcard, not a cheap noname a better one... so this card works in arch in ubuntu but not in fedora, ok can maybe happen but then you react to bugreports to such stuff..

So they have several big big show stoppers, no working safe dist-upgrade system, and this later releases are also a big problem and shows that their developer base must be really bad because they go the old route of releasing when a fixed feature-set is done. that does not work well, the best release shedule (besides rolling release) is release early release often. Why because 99% of the users will not use the alpha or beta, so they dont get much user reports. But I guess they can just not bring the release in such a stable way like ubuntus releases are most of the time a few buggy versions with unity where there ok that was a big mistake but if look over that its pretty stable, not perfekt but good enough. a somewhat good compromise for many people between stable and bleeding edge stuff.

I really wanted to like fedora, because I love gnome-shell and I dont like some desitions of canonical. I also dont like arch much, think their package tools have bad interfaces. they look like 1990 tools or so... even portage has a better interface but is really slow sadly. and debian is even in unstable just to old they have even today no current gnome packages in experimental... so I am a bit stuck without really want to stay on ubuntu, but the alternatives are so bad. heck even opensuse without having a big compony with unbelivalbe much money behind it like as example fedora seems to have better quality. but then again I dont like it too

btw in ubuntu even the alpha versions of the next verison I dont have any hardware issues.

This is a very personal opinion, which follows...

I hate apt-get yum is the best package manager IMHO

Ubuntu/Debian lacks chkconfig, which is an awesome tool to manage services (Upstart? ) You can install chkconfig in Ubuntu server and it is even back compatible to feel at home, but why not use the original?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sw...LinuxAndFedora
Too many tools for the same job... This is yum, rpm, service, chkconfig (4) vs. apt-get, apt-cache, dpkg, dpkg-deb, apt-file, debsums, service, invoke-rc.d, update-rc.d, sysv-rc-conf (10)

I like the bleeding edge part of Fedora on a desktop, since I use the radeon open source drivers. So yes, please hit me with the latest kernel etc.

I can confirm the response to bug reports, nothing happens for Fedora bug reports. For ~3 months I had to disconnect my external display from my laptop during bootup to be able to login. gdm wouldn't start with an external monitor but gnome-shell works fine, so I had to boot without, login and then attach the monitor. There was no response to the bug report whatsoever and the people in the forum... hmm... they suggested to use fglrx instead of the open driver ON FEDORA!