12.24.13

Christmas a Good Time to Install Fedora 20, But Not Upgrade to It

Posted in Red Hat at 7:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Summary: Fedora 20 receives positive reviews, but the upgrade process from Fedora 19 to Fedora 20 is allegedly “broken”

Fedora 20 was released one week ago [1,2], as we noted before. It looks nice and it comes in many 'flavours'. It lacks all sorts of proprietary software which some people insist on adding (post-installation) [3] and it has already received good reviews [4] and benchmark analyses [5]. Red Hat staff wrote about Fedora on behalf of Linux.com [6], but one writer criticises technology publications of ignoring a “broken” upgrade process [7,8]. The author of the original article has a decent track record and no known hostility towards Fedora, so the accusation may be legitimate and well-researched. Even years ago it was common to hear of people (mostly in support forums) disappointed with the Fedora upgrade process, arguing that it had rendered their system/s unusable.

After 10 years of using Fedora (on and off) I can warmly recommend it. When it comes to upgrades, however, be careful. A defunct machine can be the opposite of a Christmas gift. I recently struggled with many hardware issues that ruined my month. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

Fedora 20 Codenamed “Heisenbug” Released – Installation Guide with Screenshots
Fedora 20 Linux Debuts, Improves Cloud Image
Things to do after installing Fedora 20
Ferocious Fedora 20 review: Cutting edge Linux still as sharp as ever

If you want to a bleeding edge desktop or server Linux, then Fedora is the Linux distribution for you. If you want to play it safe, try something else.
Fedora 19 vs. Fedora 20 Linux Benchmarks

Published today are benchmarks from two Intel systems comparing the performance of Fedora 19 “Schrödinger’s Cat” to Fedora 20 “Heisenbug” for various workloads. Especially for those using open-source graphics drivers, Fedora 20 can be worth the upgrade for performance reasons.
Focus on Fedora 20 Features: ARM

It’s been a long time coming, but the Fedora 20 “Heisenbug” release brings ARM to equal status in Fedora with x86 and x86_64 releases. The Fedora 20 release, out just more than a month after the 10th anniversary of the first Fedora release, now boasts ARM as a primary architecture.

It’s not the first release to actually support ARM, but prior to Fedora 20 the ARM support was not considered a blocker for release or necessarily going to receive updates at the same time as its x86/x86_64 brethren.
Fedora 20 upgrade broken

Upgrading to Fedora 20, the version of Red Hat’s community Linux distribution released this week, from version 19, at least, is broken and this fact does not seem to have been disseminated to many tech publications that have written about the release.
Fedora and Red Hat in the News

It’s been an interesting day in the Linuxhood today. Sam Varghese posted that Fedora’s upgrade is broken and that no one is reporting it, while Jamie Watson published a 16-page Anaconda walk-through. The Motley Fool gave a recap of Red Hat positions ahead of their quarterly earnings report expected Thursday. The Red Hat Blog teased of upcoming articles highlighting Red Hat 7 features. And Red Hat is the 23rd best place to work.

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