So i've been on Fedora/Redhat AS for a couple of decades now. It's my every day developer enviro. Currently I'm on 23, which I know is old. It's rock solid stable, but I'm moving into some dev work where the repos from various vendors I can't get even close to the latest distributions for their products because of my version.

Granted there are ways around that, but when possible I far perfer to have the package manager deal with putting in the tools/software I need instead of going down the tarball/make route. Mainly the versions of Node, mongo and mongoose are way outta date. Node being the big one. But not just those.

So I'm looking to upgrade to F28, I wouldn't do 29 even though it's coming out soon as I like to let the release settle down any gremlins that might be there for a few months after release.

So here's the question(s)...

How stable is F28, I never really even think about that normally but I've seen some people complaining about random lockups/freezes. As this is my everyday workstation I really don't want to get on F28 and find out that it's just not stable. I even saw a reviewer on F28 noting this issue, but asking the community how big of an issue is this really?

I have made a clonezilla image of my drive, *just in case*, but is the jump up worth it (beyond the obvious security updates and the fact that my distro is no longer supported).

thx

A couple of folks in my office use F28, and don't seem to have any issues with it. That said, if you're someone who doesn't like to upgrade very often, you may want to consider CentOS, since the support is LONG, and it'll be a good while before you reach EOL.

For me, I use openSUSE Tumbleweed, their rolling release. Have only been bitten by one bug, which was pretty easily solved. And I'll NEVER have to reload that OS, since it is always the most bleeding-edge. Uses zypper instead of yum, but still does RPM packages, and pretty much any package I've found for SLES will work on Tumbleweed. Your mileage may vary.

Lockups/freezes are often hardware-dependant. I recommend to create a Fedora 28 Live USB and test it on your hardware. If you are satisfied with its stability, performance, and features, then go ahead and install it.

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I've used Fedora forever - on this everyday laptop in fact. I always try to stay a couple of months behind new releases to let the wrinkles get ironed out. Of my 4 Fedora systems, only one (not this one ... :shrug: ) is F28, but that is just laziness on my part.

More current releases have become much better (fantastic in fact) on release upgrades "in-place". I always do them manually rather than let dnf do it from the "notification" it keeps nagging me with. More control is good.
My advice, just do it.

ok made the jump. everything is working. except gnome tweaks crashes.

doesn't crash for other users (spun a different user up to check). so gotta figure that out. also my cairo-dock is not displaying correctly. but part of this I probably did to myself as I just resync'd my home directory from F23 to get all my stuff back, and other then those 2 things everything is working fine.

when i get the energy i'll go run down what is screwin up the tweak tool. the cairo dock is kinda annoying because tha is a damn useful thing to have as I have a my custom launchers on that. for now I gotta get some work done

Just a to whom may read this sorta thing.

1. first off my gnome-tweaks crashing was related to a LD_LIBRARY_PATH thing. I use oracle quite a bit and having the libs from oracle in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH caused gnome-tweaks to freak out and crash.

2. I have noticed that the very first time I start a terminal window that sometimes it takes up to a minute for it to come up. But it's only that first time, and it doesn't matter how long I let the computer stay up / booted/ logged in before I start up a terminal (via the activities dialog). Subsequent creations of a terminal in the same manner are lightning fast as they always should be. Not a big deal.

3. cairo-dock is broken in F28, it most likely has something to do with my multi-display. THe settings have it to be at the bottom, it puts itself at the top between my two displays and you can't get into the configs or even hit quit, only kill -9 gets rid of it. That is very unfortunate as cairo-dock is very very useful, so I'll keep at that one.

4. VPN setup. Routes are different you must specify the gateway, I never had to before To figure out which gateway to use you need to use netstat and see what is going on when the VPN is up. Not a big deal, but if you don't specify the gateway correctly the vpn will fail to connect.

5. tkcvs, yea it's an old package (F24) but i have a cvs repository i have to support/maintain. tkcvs will freeze until you hack the tcl file. This is super helpful: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1579020 I did the changes in there and tkcvs works once more.

6. So far I'm diggin it, the enviro seems fast and no crashes or freezes. I got all of my plethora of tools/apps all working well and was productive rather quickly after upgrading. I even have all my VM's working now, including android emulators. Not sure why I was a bit nervous about it as I've done this more times then I remember. It was more because I couldn't afford any down time on this workstation, but i needed to upgrade to get the latest versions of some packages I'm using.

Anyhoo thx to those that replied. Hopefully this helps someone else.

I agree with syg, and recommend staying one release back, if current is F28, then use F27, upgrade to F28 when F29 comes out, etc... That gives you a once per year upgrade.

Oh I never take the current release when it's close to release date, but 29 comes out next month so I figured 28 is pretty baked at this point. Didn't want to go to the trouble of upgrading only be 2 revs back the following month