Upgrading Fedora vs. Upgrading Ubuntu, Debian, etc.

I was reading an interesting article on Red Hat Magazine and they got me thinking. One of the cool things about both Ubuntu and Fedora is that they both have new versions of their distributions about every six months. Unfourtunately, for a person like me, I have to worry about how this will affect my nice laptop. I also tend to worry about how upgrading would handle third-party software repositories, not that you should do that anyway. The two Fedora developers that were interviewed in Red Hat Magazine made an interesting argument that downloading the DVD or CD sets and upgrading through the Anaconda installer would be better than using the Update Manager in Ubuntu, or running the command apt-get dist-upgrade as the root user on Debian-based distributions. They make a good point that why should you use the old kernel to upgrade your system when you could use the fresh new kernel off the disc.

An interesting benefit to doing this is, as they point out, is migrating your ext3 partitions to the new expiriemental ext4 filesystem. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to change file systems on a live partition. However, one benefit to the Ubuntu way of doing things is that, in the GNOME desktop, a little cute notification icon prompts you to install updates and then offers the distribution upgrade. In just a few days, when Ubuntu Hardy Heron comes out, on both Dapper Drake and Gutsy Gibbon systems, you will see such a notification icon come up. Fedora currently does not have to do such a thing. In fact, you will need to burn a disc to upgrade.

But I read later in the article that they plan to have a neat little tool called "pre-upgrade" that will let you fetch packages that you will need to upgrade your system, and after doing so, will ask you to reboot. Apparently you will be launching the Anaconda installation program to upgrade your system instead of the normal Fedora installation. Now, I like that. You get the benefits of Ubuntu's Update Manager without upgrading a running system.

I'm beginning to like Fedora and other RPM-based distributions over the Debian-based ones like Ubuntu. We'll just have to see what the upgrade expirience will be like. I plan to install Fedora 8 later in May. Then later, I would like to try out openSUSE 11.0 when that comes out.

Also, I've been a little fond of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I would like to own a laptop that comes with that preinstalled. CentOS is supposed to be 100% binary compatible with RHEL. I would also like to try before I buy. Hmmm... This will be quite an adventure.

I'm on vacation right now so I most likely not post for a little while. Just to let you know.

If you haven't tried other Linux distributions besides the usual Ubuntu, do so now!