Stable, testing, unstable, rawhide, branched and utterly confused.

[DokterW]

Hi all,

I have been looking around in the Rawhide forum, reading what I have wound in the Wiki and what I have come across online by searching, regarding Rawhide.

Hopefully this is the righht section for it, as I need some advice from the Fedora gurus here on what to do.

I started out with RHL 5.2 in '98 or '99, just trying it out. I continued using RHL and later on Fedora on a off and on basis. I guess as I started out with an RPM based distro that is what I have grown to feel more comfortable with.
Every time I now try I new distro I always end up formating my laptop and reverting back to Fedora.
I have exclusively used Fedora now since F 9.

What I enjoy about Fedora, and have a hard time kicking it, is that I can install the LiveCD (GNOME) on my 1000H Eee PC, add the RPM Fusion repo, install RT2860 driver, reboot and I am good to go.
Of all the distros I have tried, Fedora is the one that gives me the least hassle.

What I sadly find annoying is the very high release rate of new versions. Reinstalling my computer almost every 6th month is getting a bit annoying.

I know, I can go with Arch, but I know Fedora. I am very comfortable with YUM and RPM; and most importantly, Fedora more or less (as I see it) works out-of-the-box for me. I love the fact I can install, start working and tweak the system later, if I feel like it.
With arch you have to tweak the system and hope to whatever is your deity that when you reboot it will work.

So, I am generally curious how unstable is Rawhide? And how does the Branched release work, it is the kind of rolling testing release that should be more stable than Rawhide, right?
I know the Rawhide/Testing release is new, so would it be better to wait to go for it when F14 is out?

Looking forward to what the true gurus has to say.

[nimnull22]

I want to say only my opinion.

Rawhide is not "stable" or "unstable" it is rawhide. It is not made for everyday use (although sometime I use it with XFCE).
Second, you have to understand that by using of any Linux distribution you mostly use its window manager. And you have to understand that process of development of kernel and WM is different. Gnome right now is slightly unusable, but XFCE works very very promising and have no any idea about KDE under rawhide.
So I strongly suggest to use Fedora 13 or Fedora 12 (it is still supported)

..."What I sadly find annoying is the very high release rate of new versions. Reinstalling my computer almost every 6th month is getting a bit annoying."...

It is up to you how often to change version. Why I said "change" because there is a few ways to do it and some of them now and thanks to fedora team, is not very difficult. Also you can always skip one release.

[DokterW]

I want to say only my opinion.

I was hoping for that. :)

Rawhide is not "stable" or "unstable" it is rawhide. It is not made for everyday use (although sometime I use it with XFCE).

Good to know that XCE might be more stable, as I know GNOME is not that stable; which is why it is not included in sidux.
And that I am considering using openbox instead of GNOME.

It is up to you how often to change version. Why I said "change" because there is a few ways to do it and some of them now and thanks to fedora team, is not very difficult. Also you can always skip one release.

That is the thing though. Sure, I can skip a release, but then I might miss out on features I would really like take use of. Of course, a few times skipping a release would have been better, but you never know until you have tried.

Thanks for your reply.

[smr54]

I put rawhide on a laptop as a rule, so I can see how it's going. I usually do a minimal installation and add X afterwards, using fluxbox or openbox. This way, I avoid a lot of breakage, that is often, as was mentioned, Gnome breakage. (I also don't use networkmanager, which, judging from the forums, probably saves me a lot of grief.)

Depending upon how much space you have (and use) on your machine, you could always have both, and if rawhide breaks badly (as opposed to minor irritations) go back to using the release version.

Keep in mind that rawhide will usually be a bit slower than release (though not noticeably so unless you're doing a lot of compiling) as it will have a lot of debugging code in the kernel.

[jvillain]

KDE is rock solid for me on 4 different machines including my MythTV front end that is Atom 330 based.

As for reinstalling. You are actually reinstalling are you? You can just upgrade from one release to another. It's really no different than any other update.

[smr54]

Yes, it can be done, though it's not really officially supported. There is the preupgrade option, and also doing it with yum. In another thread, which I'm too lazy to look up, that's mentioned.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

Somewhat dated, but still pretty applicable.

[jvillain]

I have one box here that was installed as FC9 and has just been continuously updated to the current Rawhide branch.

I used to have a couple of cobalt servers that run headless and can only be accessed by a terminal. They have no floppy, CD or any other type of drive other than a hard drive. If any thing went wrong the reinstall process would have been nasty. I started installing Centos on them, then updated them to Redhat and then updated that to a release version of Fedora and then updated that up to Rawhide. All on hardware that was not officially supported by any of them.

There are lots of people that have upgraded from one version to another with out even knowing it right away. It may not be "supported", but it is extremely low risk and very easy to do. Just install the fedora-release rpm for the version you want and then update. Updating may not be supported but then neither is Rawhide.

[SlowJet]

it probably would be smother to wait for alpha about in 2 weeks.
Rawhide is really missed up and an install or upgrade via yum would be messy and then not much would be usable.

SJ

[GoinEasy9]

It's even possible that installing rawhide now won't get an init service because of the conflict between systemd and upstart. Only options today would be to install F13 and yum update to rawhide, or wait, like SlowJet suggests.

[tox]

it probably would be smother to wait for alpha about in 2 weeks.
Rawhide is really messed up and an install or upgrade via yum would be messy and then not much would be usable.

SJthats what i think im gonna do is wait for an Alpha release

[hephasteus]

It depends on what is being rawhided. Since it's been video stuff, dbus stuff, and basics of how fedora pokes around to find stuff on the computer it's been pretty dangerous for a long time.
You don't have to update fedora every release. I started with 4 but barely used it. Used core 7 about as much as windows and went 90 percent linux at fedora 10 release. Which I updated to 12 and then 13. Pick an even or odd distro and upgrade to it which is what most people do. I've been 100 percent linux since 13. I haven't even booted windows in over 2 weeks.