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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

It's a somewhat sad statement on the maturity of modern linux distros that my greatest excitement on seeing this announcement is knowing that I managed to install F28 off the beta track this cycle and thus I'm guaranteed not to get caught with a stale distro for a full year this time.

Beyond that, and somewhat visible the Firefox version bump, I'd be hard pressed to even tell you what changed from a desktop user's perspective.

I know this can be spun as a "Linux is so mature it's boring" sense, but the truth is I feel very old and lame right now.

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Hey, Fedora mag also has a post detailing the major changes in F28 workstation, here: https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-fedora-28-workstation/

Hope you find this helpful.

Fedora supports every release for just over 1 year. So if you upgraded immediately after a release, then it's always a full year before you need to upgrade again. Since they release every 6 months, that means skipping 1 release.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Life_Cycle

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/End_of_life

There are other distros you can use if you want long term support. Fedora has a 13 month policy, and RHEL (which is based on Fedora) is the LTS branch. RHEL 7 is fedora 19 + changes from 20. RHEL 8 will be based on F27.

For clarity: I know all that stuff. I've been working on a Linux desktop full time for literally more than 20 years, and on Fedora specifically for about 8.

My point was more that for my hour-to-hour work, desktop distros simply aren't showing much real progress these days, and by far the biggest driver of my need to upgrade is the planned obsolescence of the distribution updates and not features I need.

But if the new features aren't exciting to you, why not just use CentOS then? I mean, how many major changes can these releases make when they're only 6 months apart. They just made a release in November. I don't think anyone would be interesting in using a distro that radically changes every 6 months.

Use an LTS release, then it's 4 years apart... and you'll start getting exciting for upgrades again.

Either that, or run Rawhide (the testing, rolling release version).

Just because the OS is still supported it doesn't mean your software or new hardware you want is. I've been using RHEL or CentOS at my job on workstations for 10+ years. During that entire time it's been a struggle to get a "modern" browser working for longer than 6mo to a year (it was even harder when Flash was in the picture). I don't think I'd even bother trying to install it on a brand new laptop.

We are usually in the middle of update cycles for CentOS. Being an individual will probably make it easier upgrade more frequently. We're currently half 6.7 and half 7.2. We're only now looking to make our second serious push and take everything to 7.4.

Is there specific innovation you are waiting for or are you just grouching?

Because it sounds like you've just chosen the wrong distro. There is a selection of rolling distros that would better suit your needs. Or even non-rolling distros that are supported for a long time, CentOS/Debian/Ubuntu LTS, etc.

> Is there specific innovation you are waiting for or are you just grouching?

Where do you get that I'm grouching? I thought it was a genuinely interesting point.

Meh. I'll take my downvotes I guess. Folks just wanna do platform flames I guess.

EL has actually been deploying updates to GNOME and other desktop software. See e.g. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

I'm curious why you think this is sad. As a desktop user myself, I generally find it a good thing. It's settled into "get out of my way and let me do my work" and makes upgrades generally non-disruptive.

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