Biting the bullet?

[Rick Stevens]

On 05/11/2015 10:16 AM, Tethys wrote:
> On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 5:53 PM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
>
>>>> The problem is that newer versions tend to break everything, which
>>>> makes for a sucky end user experience. I've been doing this since Red
>>>> Hat 3.0.3 and up, so it's not as if this is all new to me.
>>
>> Well, I guess you are aware that RHL/RHEL never supported upgrading? In
>> Fedora, upgrading is supposed to work.
>
> It's not the upgrading process that's the problem. It's that the newer
> software tends to be broken in anything but the default configuration.
> I upgraded my girlfriend's desktop to F21 and it's literally unusable
> now. She has to use her laptop instead (which is also barely usable
> due to unwanted UI changes forced onto end users). Modern Linux is
> becoming like Apple - "we know what's best for you, and if you don't
> like that, you're wrong".

I don't agree. My F21 boxes are ANYTHING but default and they work just
fine. They're part desktop, part server, part development systems,
part experimental hamsters, part whatever-the-h*ll-I-need-at-the-
moment. You get the idea. Granted, it took some work to get them
working like _I_ want them (and I'm a nerd), but they do work well and
they're all fedups from F20.

That being said, I did do a raw install of F20 on a couple of them
because they were updated from F16 up to F18 or F19. Many things
changed and there were enough crumbs left over from those updates that
it made sense to start from scratch. Thus I backed them up, blew the
old stuff into the ether, installed F20 from scratch and put back the
stuff I needed that aren't parts of the distro. I did have to do a bunch
of recompilations because the libraries my binaries relied on changed.

Note that I absolutely detest the idiotic systemd and journalctl
packages (stupid, overly complex solutions for perceived problems that
never really existed) and I think Gnome3 is a huge mistake. Perhaps
it's OK on tablets or touchscreens, but it is SO far removed from the
original Gnome and such an inexcusable resource hog that I refuse to
use it and use XFCE4 instead. Mate is another viable desktop option.

These are my opinions and I know I'll get blasted for them, but that's
the way I see it.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks at alldigital.com -
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