Why should one upgrade Fedora whenever a new version is released?

[Bill Oliver]

On Mon, 15 Jul 2013, Michael Hennebry wrote:

>[snip]
>> Unless I missed it, nobody has described a particular use case yet in
>> which it is obvious that it is good to use CentOS.  Upgrading holds its
>> risks as well as using software that cannot be upgraded.  The future
>> cannot be predicted.  So how do you make a decision like between using
>> Fedora and CentOS?
>
> Is there a particular use case in which it
> is obvious that it is good to use RHEL?
>

Well, IMHO, you want RHEL (as opposed to CentOS) when you need paid support.

The particular use case that I have where I'm switching from Fedora to CentOS is a virtual machine rented in the cloud.

On my home machines, where I can touch the on-off button and see the boot screen, I can play around with installations and if something goes wrong, I can fix it.

On a virtual machine, there are more severe limitations.  For instance, if I power down my virtual machine, I have to submit a service ticket to get it turned back on -- I can't touch it to do it myself.  I have "poweroff" softlinked to "reboot."  Similarly, if there's a screw-up in upgrading that affects boot, I'm hosed.

When I got the machine, I told the company to install F16.  Now F16 is not supported, I find that it is impossible for me to either upgrade or install, because both require that I see and interact with the boot screen.  I talked to support, and they are happy to "reprovision" the box with either F19 or CentOS.  However, it means that they do it on *their* schedule, and I have to be ready to re-install all my stuff (webpage, configurations, nameserver, etc).

Thus, it's a huge hassle to either upgrade or install a new version every few months.  Since I'm using this machine as a server, I have no need to play with cutting edge stuff on it.  I'm more interested in stability and long-term security upgrades.  I'm having it reprovisioned to CentOS.

billo