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Comment by mattdm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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. :)

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

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