Hacker News Reader

Comment by derekp7 | Hacker News Reader

I use Fedora as my daily driver, since I primarily work with RHEL/CentOS at my job. The main problem I have with Fedora is their 6-month release cycle, without having periodic LTS versions. The support a version for 1 year, so that means once a year I have to go through the dance of upgrading, and seeing what is different. Fortunately the differences that cause a learning curve are getting fewer with each update.

Of course, since RHEL / CentOS is derived from a frozen version of a given release of Fedora, then CentOS can count as an "LTS" release -- it just goes too long between releases (but is great when a new one comes out).

View on HN

I believe the lack of Fedora LTS is maily to increase the sales of RHEL Workstation

You can think that RHEL/CentOS is Fedora LTS

As a longtime Fedora user, I agree that upgrading every six months is more painful than it needs to be. It's generally a LOT of packages — in the thousands — and takes a VERY long time.

The option to upgrade once a year makes this more palatable, to be sure.

I haven't tried Silverblue yet, but that might make the upgrades faster and less painful.

If you can find Flatpacks for most of your software, or if you don't often install new packages, silverblue is truly awesome. If you are installing an RPM tho you have to reboot to use it. If you are like me and have long-lived tmux sessions that you hate starting over with, the reboot is super annoying.

That said I may switch to Silverblue anyway at some point, because it really is amazing in many ways.

I have a laptop with an encrypted LVM drive that has a separate /home partition with very little space left for user files. I installed some Flatpaks and got a disk-space warning.

I'm not surprised, but Flatpaks install everything in the user's home directory. So if you know you're going to be using Flatpak apps, make /home bigger.

The system upgrade download for 30->31 was around 5GB if I remember. Which wasn't too bad. I throttled to 300KB/s. And then the reboot/install took maybe an hour. I don't think that's too bad for such a smooth process.

I tend to do that when I'm going to sleep. It usually finishes well before I wake up.

The worse part is, what feels like the daily 30 or so packages that need updates. They should really separate the critical security ones out, and batch the normal updates on a two week schedule.

I've been using silverblue as my daily driver for the past few months, installing rpm's into the 'toolbox' is the recommended way, I have a few rpms related to power management that I layer onto the ostree, but other than that everything runs in a container. It's a wonderful OS.

No -- lack of Fedora LTS is because doing LTS with actual _S_ is a huge amount of work, and our volunteer community is not super-excited about doing that work.

I've done a lot of Fedora upgrades, and only a couple have failed.

I have been amazed by how stable Fedora manages to be. I think I had a problem maybe once every couple of releases that needed a fix, and the community is always there to help. The Fedora bug-reporting process is terrific. There's a lot of engagement with the users and a genuine desire to help.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com