End of life for FC12?

Lamar Owen lowen at pari.edu
Sun Nov 14 13:25:49 UTC 2010


On Saturday, November 13, 2010 06:26:09 pm Patrick Bartek wrote:
> I've never demeaned Fedora.  There are things I don't like to be sure, but that can be said of all things.  I've been using it since FC3 after trying a dozen or so other distros before settling on it as my primary desktop OS. So that says something.  And I'm VERY particular.  It's just that over the years Fedora's development model and my needs have diverged.  And it's time to move on.

I would recommend you take a look at a RHEL6 rebuild when they become available.  RHEL6 (and thus the rebuilds) are based off of essentially F12 with some F13 stuff in there, and you can then have the same setup for five years.  Now, when the time does come to upgrade to, say CentOS 7, you will have a much harder time of it.  But if you like what you have, and you're used to the Fedora tools and setup, either CentOS 6 or Scientific Linux 6, both in the early stages of building, should fit your bill.  SL6 is already available in a 'pre-alpha' form; the pre-alpha meaning that, while the upstream source packages are stable, the process and binaries built may not be.

You will still be getting quarterly updates that can be more major than you might think; Red Hat is very good about backporting stuff, but every once in a while it becomes necessary to do a version upgrade of some package, like Firefox for one, that can cause more grief than you might think.  But, all in all, my experience running CentOS (2.1, 3, 4, and 5) has been very smooth.

The old Red Hat Linux advice was always 'skip the X.0 release, test the X.1 release, use the X.2 release' but then 7 came along (which most everybody called 7.0), 7.3 came along (which to many people, was not as stable as 7.2 had been), 8.0 came along, and then there was 9.  The most stable releases of Fedora have always seemed to be the ones right before a new RHEL, and the least stable the ones right after a new RHEL; this hasn't been true in a while, although I'll have to admit that going from F8 to F9 tried my patience; KDE 4 I really didn't need, I was productive in KDE 3.5.10.  Enough that I went Kubuntu 8.04 LTS for a while, but after seeing that the grass wasn't any greener (in fact, it was browner!) in Kubuntu-land came back with F11, which seemed nice and solid.  And there were quite a few more than the previous three Fedora releases between RHEL5 and RHEL6.

And I'm now as productive in KDE 4 as I was in 3.5.10.  But it did take a while.


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