Fedora - o for thirteen

[Nadav Har'El]

I've been a happy Redhat and then Fedora user for more than a decade, and
naturally yesterday, when Fedora 13 came out, I upgraded to it.

I am using the "preupgrade" tool. For those who've been living under a rock,
"preupgrade" is the best way to upgrade Fedora if you have an Internet
connection. It first downloads all the packages you need over the Internet,
something which might take hours but you don't care because the system is
still up and running. Then, when everything is on your machine, it asks you
to reboot, when the packages are actually actually installed. Only then is
your machine down, and in my experience, this is usally around one hour
(which is much less than what upgrades used to take just a couple of years
ago).

Anyway, the theory is good, but the practice - not as good. If I remember
correctly, *each* time I upgraded fedora, 13 out of 13 times, the upgrade
failed in some way. In at least half the cases, the package installation
process crashed leaving the installation incomplete or full of duplicate
packages (this is what happened to me yesterday). In other cases the
installation completed, but the kernel, X, or other things did not come up
correctly. In some cases important things stopped working because some
packages were forgotten to be installed, or installed and not initialized
correctly, or other things like that.

With my experience, I have always been able to fix whatever Fedora botched
up ("package-cleanup -cleandupes" was especially useful yesterday, and so
was an old kernel I had lying around), but a person with less linux knowledge
would have been completely baffled by each of those upgrade failures. It at
least half the upgrades, the system would be completely unusable afterwards!

So I'm wondering - is this only my experience? Are other Fedora users
enjoying smooth upgrades, or sharing my frustrating experience?
If this is not just my own problems (how could they be?), should we recommend
to newbies never to try upgrading Fedora without expert help? Or should we
recommend newbies to avoid Fedora completely? I really hope the answer to
the last question is no, because I really love Fedora.

Nadav.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |    Wednesday, May 26 2010, 13 Sivan 5770
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |All those who believe in psychokinesis,
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |raise my hand.