Never having done an Ubuntu upgrade, I couldn't comment on that. Quite possible though--one complaint frequently heard about Debian was its slowness to use newer versions of programs--but, one main reason for that was because they made sure that things upgraded smoothly.

I would definitely trust your knowledge over mine as far as Ubuntu upgrades.

To add on, of course, after having written about easy upgrades, seems I'm suddenly hearing a great deal, on various mailing lists and such, about how badly Ubuntu handles upgrades. Disregard my earlier comments on it. (But Debian really did used to make pretty seamless.)

..on easy upgrades. At this point; and, after sampling Ubuntu 9.10 on this PC; I feel I'd better take a close look at Fedora 12 when it releases.

I an NOT hoping for something "easy;" I just want "drama free;"
with working plug-ins. Honestly, my past experiments with Fedora have
all been good, even Fedora 6 - full of drama to get it working
properly, but I liked it at the time.

I have been using Fedora with dual boot on my laptop and desktop for some time. I have recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my new desktop with i5 750. Though it is more of a personal choice between the both, I find some differences in my experience so far. My suggestion is to try both and settle down for what you really like (alternatively have multiboot to have both, which is what I want to achieve). One of my friends has been using Ubuntu for the last 4 years and swears that it never let him down. He has been instrumental in my trying Ubuntu.

Fedora 10 to 11 upgrade over web hasn't been smooth on my desktop, though it settled down later. Based on that experience, I have learnt that reinstalls are rather better than upgrades, as recommended.

The recent i5 750 has an onboard ethernet controller which requires e1000e driver. This is not yet included in Fedora 11 or the one there doesn't work. From other threads, I came to know this would be available in Fedora 12. So I have to wait for that before I try Fedora on my desktop and I am constrained to run Ubuntu 9.10 till then, which detects the network board without any problem.

Apart from that, there are some likeable features in Ubuntu - its loading much faster, shutdown is a jiffy when compared to Fedora. However, the desktop comes only with Openoffice, Firefox browser and a few other things. For web server etc. you have to load the server ver. or load them all as you like it. Fedora comes with everything and you can choose the packages at the install time itself or later.

Both of them are not running with all 4 cores enabled in the processor. I am trying to figure out what happened. They work only with 1 core enabled unlike Windows 7, which works fine with all the cores enabled.

nvidia display board - Ubuntu offers to search and load the drivers and they work fine for most of the functionality. This is GUI driven and is user friendly. Fedora just says you need drivers and need to use yum or something else.

So try them out have fun on the way and like what you like.

Live Ubuntu 9.10 needed a driver for my Network card, it doesn't appear as robust as I was hoping. My current Ubuntu 7.04 has run perfectly all these years, but lacks some add-ons offered in newer versions; the primary reason I'm doing a re-install.

I'll certainly be happy when the next Fedora releases; I can try,
and be done with this.......

That's interesting. I remember negative comments about upgrades too. I even commented on it somewhere in LinuxQuestions. But when I looked again, I found negative comments only if you try an upgrade that is not recommended.

So what upgrades are recommended? Upgrading from one version to the very next ONLY is recommended. Thus, going from 8.10 to 9.10 is recommended.

I tried this at home on one of my laptops, I haven't taken the new system for a test drive yet.

Then again, I have to caution everyone against extrapolating from one person's lucky upgrade experience to their own: these upgrade operations, just like any other installation, are very installation/hardware dependent; so the outcome can be wildly different for two people on two different systems.

I notice, for example, lots of people saying how they had no problems installing Ubuntu on their hardware. But I had nothing but problems (it refused to recognize my WiFi hware) until 8.04, and even with 8.10, gnome-network-manager insisted that I had no connection even as I was browsing the Internet with Firefox.

This last is only a minor problem, true. More major is that I could not get Suspend to work with 8.04 or 8.10 on that laptop. Let's see how well 9.10 does with that...

I won't be unable to upgrade, due to the current version of Ubuntu I run.
I'll wipe the HD and install either OS "cleanly."

I'll feel like a Traitor should I go with Fedora, but that
may end up being the case.

My main reason to upgrade was to add the plugins,
Java and Flash to the OS without a lot of Drama.

I've already previewed Ubuntu 9.10, and Fedora 12 should
release next week; nonetheless, I will post which one
won my heart. If I want easy, I'd go with Mint, wouldn't
that be like choosing a Lexus over a Toyota? If I want a
different look, Fedora wins; but I've been very happy with Ubuntu,
so far.

The upgrade worked, I now still have all the software I installed. That's nice. But power management on this laptop seems to have taken a great leap backwards with Ubuntu 9.10.

That is, I was never that thrilled with their power management, but now it is worse: once the system goes into Suspend, I usually have to reboot to get it started again. It won't just come out of suspend.

Come to think of it, I am seeing similar problems with my Fedora11 laptop, though there it isn't quite as bad: only about 3 out of 4 times does it fail to come out of suspend.

So I am beginning to wonder if the problem isn't that the new version of gnome-power-manager has new bugs.

Has anyone installed Fedora 12 on a system which has Ubuntu 9.10 already? i.e. did you check how they work with the new grub2 and update for multi-boot without much of a problem in a straightforward manner?

I tried them both Live. Ubuntu seems "entry-level;" whereas,
Fedora looks more advanced, and I like it. As a live CD,
I could not get the screen resolution I want due to my
mobo's nVidia Geoforce 6100 video display.

Gee; there may be, yet another player in this ring, SUSE.
I ran it 3 years ago, until my CPU "melted" in the
Mexican desert. My graphics card at the time was ATi; also
an issue with some distros. I can deal with the screen resolution
in due time.

I hope to make a decision on this within 48 hours.

I hope the Zulus won't come to attack me as a traitor. LOL

That has long been my impression of the difference between the two.

Was that on both distros?

SUSE sounds like a good choice also. And have you considered Knoppix? There was a time when Knoppix was the most uptodate in terms of supporting all hardware, both new and old.


If they do, just tell them to wait their turn in alphabetical order

Yes, I tried 'em both live. I as much as burned both desktop editions of each live distro to determine if I preferred KDE or gnome better too. IMHO, KDE seems bloated. All in all, it looks like I'll don the hat again when this is all done. I've got a few comparisons to look at today and make a decision either this evening, or sometime tomorrow.

Knoppix lost me in 6. Knoppix 3.x is what I used to help get others, several years ago to ditch MS and let the Penguin waddle into their homes. The last one I liked was 5.0

Off to prepare some email files for burning and checking more compatibility........

Fedora 12. Some of the newer distros gain popularity because they are easy," such as Ubuntu; dare I say, Linux Mint? We all want simple, but a little complexity adds both fun and a bit of security. Not that Ubuntu is a Hacker's dream like the stuff from Redmond. How secure must a single-user box in a single household be?

I thank all who contributed opinions on this,

-s

I've run Debian from the mid 90s to now. I started running Ubuntu a few years ago for an easier to maintain desktop, including 9.10. I decided to try Fedora due to some problems on my notebook running Ubuntu. I used to compile kernels and a lot of software, but I don't want to now unless I must due to the time overhead and advantages of maintained packages, but I do want to find an OS that can be truly mainstream without losing the low level features.

Ubuntu has many more packages available. This makes setup much easier in many cases. After an install, the system is much more complete, with things like spellcheck working out of the box. Ubuntu has very nice accomodation for multimedia codecs, in most cases within an application you can install a system package to provide functionality. With Fedora, you have to track it all down.

Ubuntu has a too simple or much more complex Compiz (3d desktop) configuration, which can lead to trouble as settings conflict with each other. I like the effects and where they might lead, but today the only really useful one is zoom, which got disabled in Ubuntu and trying to get it working again was a mess. Fedora's configuration is much simpler but you lose access to features. I just wanted zoom, so I'm happy with Fedora, but I miss many of the neato (but not neccessarily useful) settings. Probably they can be configured with some digging. Unfortunately the default keyboard shortcuts for switching virtual desktops doesn't work with Compiz enabled out of the box, they haven't solved the fundamental Gnome - Compiz configuration divide.

Because it's more configured out of the box, Ubuntu is "bloatier." I really didn't want Tomboy, which loads the entire Mono toolchain. But because there are more packages, I can set up things like my notebook features without compiling on Ubuntu.

If forced to choose, I prefer the aesethetics and brand messaging of Fedora. I find Ubuntu's use of brown and weird interstitial pages (logging in, etc) to be ugly, although due to the amateur way graphics and design are treated in these communities they both have a long way to go. Neither distro seems to know how to manage something that maintains core technical facility and looks great while providing enhancements - why not keep the console boot up messages but make them interesting and easy to refer to, don't cover them with a logo.

Fedora's desktop icons remind me of Windows 95. Ubuntu 9.10 was heading in a better direction with some of the gnome icons, more subtle and refined.

I decided to try Fedora because there are some issues with the way the Ubuntu kernel is tweaked that causes wireless problems. That's critically important. Hopefully Fedora won't have these problems, but it hasn't been long enough to say yet.

Fedora was supposed to have improved Pulse Audio setup. Pulse Audio has been a big problem in transition, and I have problems with 5.1 sound on my media PC. Unfortunately PA seems to have basic problems on my notebook in Fedora.

Fedora is doing some interesting stuff with SELinux, but putting up a dialog box explaining how to edit policy files when you want to do something as simple as file a bug report feels like being dumped onto a dirt road, at best.

Fedora has some updated versions of some system files, but they're both running the same kernel version.

I hope the above is useful to some people. Distros have come a long way, I think the next generation may be near perfect, the main issues remaining will be around application support. I hear rumours of a packaging system that will work across distros, that would be terrific so the focus can shift to getting the low level, system oriented stuff right.

After much Frustration with both Downloaded Fedora 12 DVDs
(failed integrity), I went with Ubuntu 9.10. Yes, I burned slowly.

At least the Zulus will be happy, as I am now.

Again, I thank all who gave opinions on this,

-s