[NTLUG:Discuss] Giving Up On FEDORA

[Justin M. Forbes]

Sorry to revive an old thread, but this needed to be mentioned...

On Sun, Jan 03, 2010 at 12:51:15PM -0600, Dennis Rice wrote:
> In Fedora's desire to be on the bleeding edge and only support those 
> that wish to be developers, I am dropping it.
> 
> I did an upgrade and it has FAILED!  What is worse, the previous 
> revisions have also been corrupted.
> 
> I have a HP Compaq 8710p with three kernels presently installed,
> 1.   vmlinuz-2.6.31.1-56.fc12.i686.PAE
> 2.   vmlinuz2.6.32-0.65.rc8.git5.fc13.i686.PAE
> 3.   vmlinuz.2.6.32.2-15.fc13.i686.PAE
> 
> On upgrading to fc11 and doing an upgrading to 12, 11 was made unusable, 
> failing at the GRUB.  Fortunately 12 did work.  Later a I did another 
> update and 13 Beta was installed (#1 above).  This worked generally ok 
> but the connection to my HP network connected (Jetconnect) failed.  
> Unfortunately at the same time the printer connection for 12, which 
> previously worked now failed.  This last week I performed another update 
> and the update to fc13 was installed and 11 was deleted.  Now both 12 
> and both versions of 13 work to a very limited extent.  All three 
> versions freeze up and the only thing that moves on the screen is the 
> mouse cursser.  The only way I can shut down the system is to do a 
> physical power off.  Applications work for a while and the lock.  Open 
> Office and Firefox have been made unsuable over any extend period of time.

There is no Fedora 13 beta yet, in fact we are not even in feature freeze.
What you installed was a development tree that may or may not work at any
given time.  For an idea of where we are in the development cycle, see:

  F-13 schedule:

  2010-01-26  Feature Submission Deadline
  2010-02-09  Feature Freeze
  2010-02-16  Alpha Freeze
  2010-03-23  Beta (Final Development) Freeze
  2010-04-29  Compose Release Candidate


> 
> I do not wish to be part of the bug reporting process because to me, as 
> just an end user, it is too complex of a process.  I am not a programmer 
> or developer, just a basic user that likes the power of freedom of 
> Linux.  My discuss with Fedora is not allowed to be written down.  I am 
> hopeful that someone on the Fedora team is able to read this and learn 
> that they are orienting the OS to a select group of users and thus 
> cutting off many other users.  If they want the mass user base to keep 
> using their OS, then they need to make it usable and issue a quality 
> product.  I did not request the upgrade to 13, it was forced upon me and 
> from that point on the quality of the system deteriorated.  I will now 
> be switching to another distribution.

As a basic user who does "not wish to be part of the bug reporting process"
I would highly recommend avoiding the rawhide trees all together, but
especially before the Alpha release next month, and probably before the
Beta release of F13 in March.
Rawhide is great for testing and devlopment, I run it on several machines,
but I don't move my primary desktop until after Alpha sometime, and don't
ever put my laptop on the rawhide tree.

Justin