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Fedora Linux Might Drop Incremental Upgrades (happyassassin.net)
prisoninmate writes: As you might know, Fedora and many other GNU/Linux distributions require users to do an incremental upgrade when attempting to move from an older version of the operating system to the most recent one. For example, if you want to upgrade from Fedora 21 to Fedora 23, you will have first to upgrade to Fedora 22. Lately, Fedora upgrades have become more stable and reliable, mostly because of some brand-new technologies, such as the DNF package manger. Fedora's Adam Williamson theorizes about an innovative method that might support official upgrade of the Fedora Linux operating system across two releases in the future.
I have gone from 20 to 23 via upgrades with no issues. The fedora team does a pretty good job with the instructions and methods. Now if they would only get rid of the stinking graphical boot and the "quiet" mode. What do people fear kernel messages at boot?
Yeah, occasionally, when there are major changes, like when systemd (peace be upon it) was introduced, this might not work, but I've gotten through quite a few version skips just fine.
Excuse my while I hurl. dnf from an interface perspective has been nothing but a headache for 2.5 releases, and it STILL can't do the things with reliability that yum did, nor does it have the ecosystem of plugins for people with various edge cases. And don't even get me started about local file system + repo installs.
Going back beyond that, "stable and reliable" is not the track record I would ascribe to anything about Fedora in the last 8 releases, except for maybe SELinux policy (except for the policy *RPM* which had a major clusterf*ck blocking update a couple of releases back).
Fedora brought us such lovely presents like UsrMove, the confusing mish-mash of grub2, and the unholy holy war precipitated by strong-arming the "systemd way of doing thing" from the ground up, so much as restricting RPMs from having *any* SysV support in the spec file.
So Fedora isn't inspiring a lot of confidence with moving to a direct rolling release. Frankly, people that want this might as well just sit on rawhide instead and re-vagrant/chef/devops/continainer their boxes anew each nanosecond.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I totally agree. I've been using a separate partition, fresh installs and Ansible playbooks for my last two "upgrades" and it's been a breeze. I do a HDD backup and put some stuff in the cloud just in case but so far no problem.
The only thing that is constantly a PITA is VirtualBox. Every single time it's a nightmare to get that thing running with the right mix of kernels, kernel headers and various libraries. When I move to Fedora 24 (or whatever version) I'm switching my VMs back to VMWare Workstation.
lucm, indeed.
welcome to the club :)
Wayland unfortunately doesn't fix many problems linux desktop applications have. You still will need compositor specific code in order to support more than the bare minimum. Fortunately however, wayland fixes many security related issues.
Impressively bad new-slashdot headlining here.
Is it really worth plumbing the depths of false 'shock headlines' just to pull in views?
They are not DROPPING anything, they are looking at ADDING the ability to skip updates.
You can still incrementally update of course, there is no hint of dropping that.
They may allow you to instead update two versions in one go.
If anything, you could say they are dropping the REQUIREMENT for incremental updates.
But hey, the heyday of Slashdot editors is, as we know, long gone. Such a pity.
'never had a problem with Fedora. I've only ever done a single install on the 4 machines I run (2 "desktop + 2 laptop)), and then incrementally upgrade 3 month after a new release.
Yeah, I've been keeping /home on a separate physical drive for years, whatever OS I'm using (and periodically mirrored to a NAS).
Never understood why /home was not enforced to be at least on a different partition.
Mac