Its been a while since I posted anything, in fact, come to think of it this is probably the worst case of writers block that I have had in a while. Can’t seem to get down to writing anything at all and add to that a slightly exaggerated work schedule and it only gets worse. Well, now I have a good reason. Yesterday, saw the release of Fedora 9 (Sulphur). Normally, I don’t write about a distro until I have actually installed or upgraded, but this time I have a question as well. Should I stick with Fedora and go to 9 or should I be looking at Ubuntu. Some friends have been after me for a while to switch to Ubuntu. I have actually given it a test drive several times but somehow, I just seem to come back to Fedora. Most of the servers I run and manage are all running Centos, so this brings me to the question:
What distro should I run on my laptop?
a) Ubuntu - supposedly slick and everything just works. Plus now has Long term support.
b) Fedora - Familiar is favourite. Cutting edge, most innovative and still my favourite.
c) Centos - A step back, but stable and longer life-cycle.
Last year when I was at FOSS.IN I met with Rahul Sundaram who gave me the time tested “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” when I asked if I should upgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8. I normally, like to wait for a while for the dust to settle down before I upgrade my main machine (my laptop) after all my livelihood depends on this machine. I can’t afford to spend hours trying to fix it to keep things running. I need it to be reasonably stable and extremely reliable.
Right now, I don’t have a choice, I do need to move on. Come June 13th and Fedora 7 will die. At least officially, and then there will be no more updates to it. Running a rapidly changing distro does have that disadvantage, but of course the changes in the new ones are always something to look forward too.
My gut (and its a large gut) feel is to stick with Fedora, just curious to know what others who may be in a similar state are doing?
Would love to get some comments and feedback. Plan is to change over this weekend. Fedora 9 looks tempting and I will be installing it to play around with. Yes, I did manage the download, despite all the chokes.
Cheers…Kishore
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