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Comment by FeistySkink | Hacker News Reader

Oh, wow. My whole extended family has CentOS on their machines for years because of LTS. Not sure what I'm going to replace it with now and how. Perhaps there's going to be Fedora LTS at some point soon. I sure hope Fedora is not the next casualty.

IBM strikes again.

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I'm a little confused by this. Well, first, I'd encourage you to try Fedora Workstation for your family -- we've worked on making upgrades painless, so that they're basically an automated thing that happens while you go for coffee once or twice a year (at your option). But second, if a "Fedora LTS" would fit your needs, why not give CentOS Stream a look? It's not actually going to be that different from CentOS Linux, and almost certainly will have less constant change than a theoretical Fedora LTS would.

Also, I am not one of the highest upptity-ups in the company or anything, but from the inside: I see no evidence whatsoever that this is the result of IBM anything.

Thank you for the reply. While I personally never had a single issue with upgrading between Fedora releases, I also have the skills the resolve any potential ones if I would. I don't want to deal with somebody's computer suddenly being borked halfway across the world with no way to assist. So far CentOS fit that niche beautifully, with seldom major clean reinstalls (i.e. wipe root) when I'm there (7.x > 8.x). I'm going to evaluate CentOS Stream and perhaps you are right and it's a viable replacement.

I don't want to deal with somebody's computer suddenly being borked halfway across the world with no way to assist.

Fedora Silverblue could be interesting alternative to regular Fedora then, since you can boot into or roll back to a previous release. You can also pin a known-good OSTree commit, so that one could always boot that version.

This. Although I 'd suggest running Silverblue in a VM first to learn about package layering and flatpaks. (This was my migration path. Made sure all my use cases were working within the VM before I installed on bare metal.)

(Disclaimer: I am capable of fixing upgrade issues myself.) I've not done a wipe-root reinstall of Fedora since 2013. I've in place upgraded every two versions or so - basically as soon as the version I'm using goes EOL.

Redhat just reneged on its commitments regarding CentOS 8. When has this happened before?

> we've worked on making upgrades painless, so that they're basically an automated thing that happens while you go for coffee once or twice a year (at your option)

In my experience (just went through that, F32 -> F33), it's painless but definitely not "an automated thing that happens while you go for coffee"; each machine took a whole day, it's a huge download (many gigabytes) and the install itself seems to be severely fsync-limited (several hours while the progress bar slowly fills and the disk light is lit all the time; after the fact, "journalctl -b -1" shows it was installing/cleaning package by package all that time).

Fedora Silverblue can be an option then - the roots is an immutable snapshots tracked by OSTree It can build an updated OSTree snapshot in the background & only the difference from what you have are downloaded. Then you reboot into that new snapshot, while still having the old one (and ony other you care to keep) available, in case something is not right with the new one.

That should address most of the issues you mention. :)

Silverblue, in my experience, is not really there. I like the idea. As of my latest try at it in August, I wouldn't recommend anybody recommend it unless they're going to be physically standing in front of the machine on a regular basis.

Yeah, it's true that the people I know that use it do so on workstations. Still IMHO the technology (OSTree) is solid & perfect match for various server & mobile use cases. Once mature enough of course. :)

Your whole family runs CentOS as their desktop operating system?

Extended yes. And has been for years without a single issue. Immediate family all on Fedora. Very little maintenance, automated updates. Desktop software installed through flatpaks. Easy remote management. Users don't care about the OS as long as they know how to open the browser, email, word processor, Skype, Zoom, etc.

Fair enough, was just confirming. It didn't occur to me that flatpaks would probably assist in bridging the gap between a "Workstation" OS and a conventional end-user OS where yum repos and EPEL might be lacking.

> Easy remote management.

Just out of curiousity, are you SSHing in directly, or installing the Teamviewer RPM on all of them?

Each house has an single always-on VPN client (RPi) to the central server so I ssh in case something is up. Pretty much never happens, but it's good to know the option is there. Most issues are with a specific software and not the OS, so I need to have a visual to help resolve, e.g. "Where is my contact list in Viber?" or "Why do I see this page?".

Plus, I'm running Pi-Hole in docker and I ssh to upgrade it from time to time, (docker pull, docker-compose down/up, etc.). I haven't bothered automating this because some things change between releases and I still end up doing manual configuration changes.

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