My niece's windows laptop is suffering the usual woes, so it is a good opportunity for Linux to "come to the rescue". She's going off to college so whatever I set her up with has to stand the test of time. I also admin an older relative's machine remotely, so long story short - I need to admin both machines from a distance. My preferred os is Fedora, but the upgrade window is at most 13 months. The LTS distros like red-hat derivaties are all too conservative in their repositories for these users. Ubuntu 12.4 might be a better choice if it proves reliable - which is a big if. But supposing we use a distro with a shorter lifespan between versions. Has anyone found a sure-fire way of doing os version upgrades from a distance. These users won't be co-operative in handling DVDs for re-installs, and it seems sequential software-distro-upgrades (like using pre-upgrade on fedora) tend to be less reliable over a longer period of years.

Anyone faced this challenge? What did you do?

I did, I made the move to Arch Linux. I loved Fedora (still do, in fact) because the ol' gal was pretty educational for me. I've been using Arch Linux for some years now...I think it's right what you're looking for...
As for the remote admin, I think VNC could do the trick...

Good luck!

Thor

The thing with rolling distros is they can break more unexpectedly. Assuming we stay with non-rolling distros, anyone found a good way to upgrade from a distance?

The 'buntus upgrade nicely...I had Xubuntu do one lately, went smooth...
In fact, the thing does that all alone, too...

I would NOT recommend fedora ( i like the distro BUT am a VERY BIG fan of " use the correct tool" )
UNLESS she is going into CS and computers and software and WANTS to learn the ins and outs of a OS then fedora is a BAD choice
Then the 13 month life span


same for CentOS 6.2 or ScientificLinux6.2 but for the opposite
they are SO L O N G term that not a great choice for school
The 10 life span for CentOS 6


She would probably like OpenSUSE 12
The 18 month is not a fast as fedora
and not quite as "cutting edge"

I installed that on my (now retired ) mom's computer and she loves it