Fedora Linux Might Drop Incremental Upgrades (happyassassin.net) 91
prisoninmate writes: As you might know, Fedora and many other GNU/Linux distributions require users to do an incremental upgrade when attempting to move from an older version of the operating system to the most recent one. For example, if you want to upgrade from Fedora 21 to Fedora 23, you will have first to upgrade to Fedora 22. Lately, Fedora upgrades have become more stable and reliable, mostly because of some brand-new technologies, such as the DNF package manger. Fedora's Adam Williamson theorizes about an innovative method that might support official upgrade of the Fedora Linux operating system across two releases in the future.
How about slashdot fix the headline.. (Score:4, Informative)
Impressively bad new-slashdot headlining here.
Is it really worth plumbing the depths of false 'shock headlines' just to pull in views?
They are not DROPPING anything, they are looking at ADDING the ability to skip updates.
You can still incrementally update of course, there is no hint of dropping that.
They may allow you to instead update two versions in one go.
If anything, you could say they are dropping the REQUIREMENT for incremental updates.
But hey, the heyday of Slashdot editors is, as we know, long gone. Such a pity.
Re: How about slashdot fix the headline.. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
You're referring to "Windows 10" as in "I quit using Windows 10 years ago, what took you so long"?
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently I whoooshed one of the mods as well.
Re:How about slashdot fix the headline.. (Score:5, Informative)
IThey are not DROPPING anything, they are looking at ADDING the ability to skip updates.
You can still incrementally update of course, there is no hint of dropping that.
Indeed! I was really surprised to read this headline, which implied that "incremental upgrades" are no longer being supported. It turns out, however, that the poster simply has a completely different concept of "incremental upgrade" than I do: For him, the normal upgrade is just "upgrade", and an "incremental upgrade" is when the distro forces you to upgrade in several small steps instead of one big step. The plan is to stop forcing you to take these small steps. And that's it! Upgrades - the normal upgrades that have always been supported - will NOT be dropped.
Re: (Score:1)
But is it really an upgrade? Doesn't the MS installer just installs a clean XP next to 98 and renames the Windows folder to Windows.old?
I was always under the impression that Microsoft didn't real upgrades, just fresh installs and then trying to install existing programs on the fresh installs based on the information found in the registry or install logs or whatever. Or by just putting a shortcut to the application somewhere on the hard disk and let the backwards compatibility do its work. Not that it's bad
Re: (Score:1)
But is it really an upgrade? Doesn't the MS installer just installs a clean XP next to 98 and renames the Windows folder to Windows.old?
Yes, it is upgrades: The Windows.old directory is for safe-keeping. The OS itself has been upgraded. True, in the case of 98 => XP it means replacing everything. But an OS is tasked with managing hardware devices and running applications. All relevant settings as well as compatible applications are carried over thanks to the registry (yes, the registry!). User files and data moved to the correct locations.
20 to 23 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
People don't fear kernel messages, they just make the computer look like an unprofessional, hacked together piece of shit while text zooms by. People, even Linux users, place value on aesthetics.
By that logic a car dashboard should only have a speedometer, no tachometer because most people drive automatics anyway, a light that comes on when the engine is about to overheat because who needs an early warning from a gauge and on that same note you get a light that tells you that the gas tank is about to run out because you're unlikely to need to be able to estimate range anyhow.
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong. Try displaying the status message of every component in your car, and we have a better comparison. The engine light equivalent would be a single button on the top left or something summarizing all the messages during kernel boot.
No end user should have to read kernel boot messages.
Re: (Score:2)
I've got GRUB set to not use the quiet or RHGB options, but then again I'm still using GRUB 1 so that I can configure it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Did you do this with fedup? From what I could see, it was possible [despite the dire warnings from fedora about "don't do it"].
And, I've edited grub.cfg to remove "quiet" and "rhgb" not so much because of aesthetics, but because my graphics card was having issues with some versions of the nouveau driver.
I've been doing this for years (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, occasionally, when there are major changes, like when systemd (peace be upon it) was introduced, this might not work, but I've gotten through quite a few version skips just fine.
No thanks. If you want that, just rawhide yourself (Score:4, Interesting)
Excuse my while I hurl. dnf from an interface perspective has been nothing but a headache for 2.5 releases, and it STILL can't do the things with reliability that yum did, nor does it have the ecosystem of plugins for people with various edge cases. And don't even get me started about local file system + repo installs.
Going back beyond that, "stable and reliable" is not the track record I would ascribe to anything about Fedora in the last 8 releases, except for maybe SELinux policy (except for the policy *RPM* which had a major clusterf*ck blocking update a couple of releases back).
Fedora brought us such lovely presents like UsrMove, the confusing mish-mash of grub2, and the unholy holy war precipitated by strong-arming the "systemd way of doing thing" from the ground up, so much as restricting RPMs from having *any* SysV support in the spec file.
So Fedora isn't inspiring a lot of confidence with moving to a direct rolling release. Frankly, people that want this might as well just sit on rawhide instead and re-vagrant/chef/devops/continainer their boxes anew each nanosecond.
Re: (Score:2)
Excuse my while I hurl. dnf from an interface perspective has been nothing but a headache for 2.5 releases, and it STILL can't do the things with reliability that yum did,
What problems are there with dnf? I'm rather neutral towards it, but I haven't found any problems that I didn't have with yum.
Re: (Score:1)
Took far too long to be released, was overhyped during the time, and when it finally came out, by a different group of people, it was derided for being a fairly lazy sequel to DN3D.
Re: (Score:2)
How about fixing it properly? (Score:2)
So basically what it says is that jumping from Fedora 21 to 23 is unsupported, but 21 -> 22 and 22 -> 23 is supported. Well that's nice, so why can't I daisy chain updates? It's not unique to Linux, I'm sure everybody who had to reinstall Windows knows what I'm talking about.... first there's a bunch of updates, then you can install some more updates, then update the updater, then install the service pack, then install some more updates, then some more security patches to the last updates. If you don'
Re: (Score:2)
Mostly it's because changes to the major version of a distribution tend to involve major-version transitions of multiple software packages, which tends to involve non-trivial differences in configuration files that users will have changed from the initial default contents. Packages can contain scripts to help deal with that, but if I'm doing a 21->23 upgrade I need to run both the 21->22 and the 22->23 scripts and that's hard when the 22 packages were never installed and the 21->22 scripts which
Re: (Score:2)
NLite has offered this for a long time, W7+ works according to the site (google if you like). Prep the original install plus service packs plus other updates, and you get a one shot install.
Linux is no monolith, though, and I don't expect any distro to anticipate which updates need to be slipstreamed.
And then we have the solution to a non monolith os, the package mananger. The os doesn't have built in updates, there are multiple managers to handle it.
And that's why you get everything described here. If linu
Re: (Score:3)
I totally agree. I've been using a separate partition, fresh installs and Ansible playbooks for my last two "upgrades" and it's been a breeze. I do a HDD backup and put some stuff in the cloud just in case but so far no problem.
The only thing that is constantly a PITA is VirtualBox. Every single time it's a nightmare to get that thing running with the right mix of kernels, kernel headers and various libraries. When I move to Fedora 24 (or whatever version) I'm switching my VMs back to VMWare Workstation.
Re: I never upgrade Linux (Score:1)
Libvirt and qemu are the way to go
Re: (Score:2)
Well I just tried, and performance is awful compared to VirtualBox. The host is taking a beating and the guest is sluggish.
I've looked at a few Youtube videos of gamers and they had stellar performance with qemu and splice, but after reviewing the details I found out they typically use PCI pass-thru with a dedicated video card for the guest. When you're duplicating hardware and dedicating it to individual virtual machines I don't see the point of using virtualization at all.
Maybe qemu works well for headles
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I always do fresh installs since I have a /home on a separate partition.
OpenSUSE user here, been doing essentially the same as you for years. I have difficulty seeing why anyone would want to do it any other way.
Re: (Score:1)
You have to reinstall all your applications/packages, reconfigure (assuming you've changed settings) etc. /home
System wide settings are not saved in
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, I've been keeping /home on a separate physical drive for years, whatever OS I'm using (and periodically mirrored to a NAS).
Never understood why /home was not enforced to be at least on a different partition.
Mac
Re: (Score:3)
Wayland unfortunately doesn't fix many problems linux desktop applications have. You still will need compositor specific code in order to support more than the bare minimum. Fortunately however, wayland fixes many security related issues.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree very much but I have a couple fears with Wayland :
- many apps may fail to implement mouse selection -> paste on middle click. Worse, we may get lectured by "designers" about how we do not actually want to do that?
- a new round of bugs and graphics driver limitations, obviously.
I suppose a 3D desktop on Wayland will have less bugs than a 3D desktop on Xorg, but more than a 2D desktop on Xorg. But may still have some new bugs anyway.
A crapton of applications will still require X so will run in the
Re: (Score:2)
- many apps may fail to implement mouse selection -> paste on middle click. Worse, we may get lectured by "designers" about how we do not actually want to do that?
That isn't something apps need to be written for, Wayland already has that functionality. The problem is that the way it's implemented in Wayland is different from the way that it's implemented in X.Org. So while middle click paste and copy on selection work for native Wayland apps, and apps that run on a shim, they do not work between the shim and a native app. As far as I've been able to gather from internet searching anyway.
So if a program is running as a native Wayland app everything should work as it u
Re: (Score:2)
I recall celebrating The Year of the Linux Desktop in 2005. Maybe you were asleep and missed it.
Re: (Score:1)
I know, I shouldn't reply to trolls, but, there is nothing wrong with X11. GNOME might be broken yes, but X11 is a perfectly fine display protocol. It's a shame that X.org is the only surviving X server (I'm still using XSGI here! It's awesome!)
Re: (Score:2)
You can run Wayland on Fedora already, and quite a few folks are (I have my F23 laptop running GNOME on Wayland full time).
Ubuntu does this already for their LTS releases (Score:3)
welcome to the club :)
Re: (Score:2)
FWIW, I certainly didn't intend to present this as something unique or novel, that gloss has been added by the slashdot summary writer.
We can already upgrade (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, you lost me there. How is this even remotely related to the ongoing Windows 10 forced upgrade? Linux users by and large *want* to upgrade. And they do so regularly without losing major functionality. Even when the desktop GUI changes, say to Gnome 3, there's still Mate. Heck even KDE 3 is still available in some form for those who really want it. I don't mind Linux upgrades at all compared to Windows, because generally-speaking I don't lose anything.
How is Linux Mint always catching instead of l
Re: (Score:2)
(I tried doing a Debian install, but it's still compiling...)
You may be thinking of Gentoo.
BSD (Score:1)
After moving to FreeBSD thanks to systemd I've noticed how much easier things like upgrades are. With a few command lines I can upgrade my base system and my programs thanks to ports are always up to date. No need to upgrade a whole linux distro version to get the latest updates to programs.
Re: (Score:2)
I have also moved to FreeBSD, but may move to CentOS 6.7.
FreeBSD is awesome in many ways - seems perfect for servers.
But, as a desktop, FreeBSD seems to have many short-comings. FBSD will not work with dropbox. It has very poor support for NTFS. FBSD does not auto-mount USB drives. I have not been able to get my VPN to work.
Re: (Score:2)
I use ntfs-3g, it sucks. I can copy files, but cannot delete, or move.
Linux binary compatibility does not work for dropbox. I think Linux uses something called inotify, which the BSDs do not have.
Dropbox requires installing wine. Accessing NTFS requires installing special utilities, and even then does not work correctly. Auto-mounting requires special setup. Getting my privateinternetaccess VPN to work is such an ordeal that I gave up on it. Also, the Chrome browser does not work well, sites crash all time:
Re: (Score:2)
I have also moved to FreeBSD, but may move to CentOS 6.7.
FreeBSD is awesome in many ways - seems perfect for servers.
You're kidding right? The 1990s called and they want their OS back. BSD is so far behind in so many things it's almost like riding a bicycle instead of using a car. However if what you want to do only can be done by a bicycle, that's the tool to use. Don't use it for a real server. It's simply not up to the task in the way a modern Linux kernel is. Much better filesystems, there is no mandatory access controls in bsd... and so much more. If it weren't for the BSD people giving away their time to port it Ap
Re: (Score:2)
> Don't use it [FreeBSD] for a real server. It's simply not up to the task in the way a modern Linux kernel is.
Does Netflix know this?
Re: (Score:2)
> Don't use it [FreeBSD] for a real server. It's simply not up to the task in the way a modern Linux kernel is.
Does Netflix know this?
Heh... funny you should ask. I signed up for netflix yesterday. From their site and offerings I think it's a captain obvious moment to say - Nope! They seem to be a business in trouble.
Re: (Score:2)
Regardless of whether, or not, you like Netflix offerings: Netflix handles a *huge* amount of traffic using FreeBSD servers.
Really? (Score:2)
Not being funny, but if incremental upgrades are supported, or were at one point, is there not a blindingly obvious fact that you could get an old one, and update it twice in a row transparently, and not tell the user?
I understand that a properly non-incremental upgrade might be slightly faster but also it's likely to cock a lot of things up. I just don't get why - if there's an upgrade path from 1.0 to 2.0, and from 2.0 to 3.0, and from 3.0 to 3.1, you can't just install 3.1 over the top of 1.0. You don'
Original author here (Score:2)
The summary seems to get this a bit garbled, so here's an executive summary:
* This is simply about the support status of upgrades across more than one Fedora release
* It's not about making any major technical / design changes to any software
* It's certainly not about removing anything that is currently possible
* Right now, upgrades across more than one release are technically possible, but until recently were not really tested and not necessarily considered 'supported'
* We're now testing upgrades across two