Comment by tannerj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannerj | Hacker News Reader

I used Fedora for about six months as my desktop OS a couple of years ago. It was my first "real" choice using linux. I started with Ubuntu because it was so popular at the time and I wanted to try something new so I chose Fedora because it had the latest and greatest software. That sounds awesome in theory, but in practice I was constantly having things break when I updated my system. The final straw for me was the kernel modules for virtualbox. I do all my web development in VirtualBox VM's and when I was stuck waiting for Virtual Box to release the new kernel modules so that I could get working again the pain was significant enough to warrant a change. I know that is an issue with Virtual Box and not Fedora, but I never have that problem now that I've moved away from Fedora. Looking back, it could have been possible that if I had built Virtual Box from source instead of installing from yum, I may have been okay, but I was still not that comfortable with linux at the time. I switched to Mint, and have been happy with that distro. I really liked Fedora, but if I'm being honest, I've been happier with mint.

From what I seen this is an issue between the main Fedora repo and RpmFusion. The nvidia drivers have the same issue.

Fedora upgrades the kernel, but RpmFusion havn't re-built kernel modules yet. So you do an yum upgrade, and are left with a new kernel, without the modules you need. There's the akmod- modules that's supposed to recompile itself on a kernel upgrade, but in my experience that works about half the time.

Small things like this gets old really fast. Even if there's workarounds, people will have to remember those, and it's easier to find an alternative that just works instead of listening to people saying "but that's because" or "you can just".

You could just add linux-kernel to ignored upates list, that would have solved VM tools breaking.

I bet some people did. But when you look at the population as a whole, it probably looks like 5% "I can add linux-kernel to the ignored updates list," and 95% "I'm switching back to Ubuntu because it breaks less."

I don't think the problems of running a specific distro in a VM applies to general population at all ;) Only a small percentage of developers will ever face the issue, and googling a fix is faster than re-installing whole OS.

I don't think anything about running Fedora applies to the general population at all! :P

I'm sure I'm not a typical user, but I've definitely had more Linux VMs than I've had native installs. Even if it's not a majority, I don't think it's uncommon.

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