The Good & Bad OpenGL Drivers On Linux

[liam]

Fedora has a support cycle of 13 months (or better until current version+2 is released + 1 month), Ubuntu has 5 years for LTS versions and 9 months for interim versions.

Just wanted to mention that there is a possibility that the way you talking about Fedora's lifecycle may change if Fedora.Next is accepted (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedor.../boardproposal).

[dee.]

Also what kind of update are you doing that 'bricks your system' ...? Unless you're on fairly old hardware where things don't get tested a kernel releases probably isnt gonna brick your system... Mesa same deal, if you're using one of the 'tier 1' (intel, radeon, nouveau) drivers an update shouldn't break things because they get tons of testing. Xorg updates... X in the past has broken things on hardware but the devs seem to have gotten better about it.

I thought we were talking about distros... I've heard of some (many?) cases where updating between non-LTS versions of Ubuntu and derivatives (eg. from 11.04 -> 11.10) just plain fails and shitcans the entire OS. I've heard some similar stories about Fedora but I don't know if it's common there. Presumably the safer option is usually to reinstall instead of letting the distro try updating itself.

With LTS releases, you only have to bother with distro upgrades every 5 years. Not everyone needs the latest software. (Although I'm kinda bad at practicing what I preach, in some ways at least - right now I'm running a nightly build of Cinnamon because the backport version had issues...) But still I like the security of knowing that I don't have to upgrade the entire distro in a few months, if I don't want to.

Also its not even an issue of "I dont want to update every 6months." Even Fedora gives you 18 months of updates from date of release, Ubuntu gives 2 years if I remember right... Suse I don't know.

Ubuntu only gives 9 months for non-LTS now. By extension, that also applies to all derivatives, like Kubuntu or Mint.

[Awesomeness]

How about getting support for 5 years and not having to do an update that possibly ends up bricking your system every 6-9 months?

That's stupid. Upgrades to new release versions (i.e. not alphas!) of properly supported Linux distributions do not brick systems.

[Ericg]

I thought we were talking about distros... I've heard of some (many?) cases where updating between non-LTS versions of Ubuntu and derivatives (eg. from 11.04 -> 11.10) just plain fails and shitcans the entire OS. I've heard some similar stories about Fedora but I don't know if it's common there. Presumably the safer option is usually to reinstall instead of letting the distro try updating itself.

Okay, we're smashing terminology here, hence the misunderstanding. Whether a person goes through the re-installation process or 'updates' it through the package manager I consider that upgrading the OS if you're going from version N to N+1 (or N+2...+3..+4 etc). And with that in mind when you said 'bricking the OS' from an update I was thinking you mean like you installed the new version and the kernel didn't support your hardware that it did the version prior. Or the first boot had X (or worse) crashing and you couldn't even update the packages to fix it, or something like that. Not like "The update process didnt work and I got to keep the pieces"

I can't comment on Ubuntu's updatability. I never tried it, I always reinstalled. Fedora on the other hand... Fedora used to be kind of iffy. But with the introduction of fedup in the last release its been absolutely perfect so far. I went from 17 to 18, and 18 to 19 with no problems. I also did 19 to the alpha of 20 using fedup, but later wiped that out and put 19 back on because of instability in the alpha (shocker, an alpha release is unstable xD, but I just wanted to play around with some of the new tech anyway)

Ubuntu only gives 9 months for non-LTS now. By extension, that also applies to all derivatives, like Kubuntu or Mint.

Interesting that its down to 9 months for non-LTS. I didn't know they changed it, good to know.

[Ericg]

Debian does only backport security updates, not bugfixes to the Stable branch. Newer kernels are available via the backports repository, Mesa (currently?) not.

Thanks for the correction Vim, I'm actually even more annoyed if Debian doesnt backport bug fixes... Kernel updates in backports is good, but Mesa would probably be a good idea too. Presumably they are doing kernel updates for hardware enablement... which mesa would also fall into that category for graphics hardware.

I am pretty sure he means a bricked OS, not bricked hardware. Just do a websearch for "Ubuntu update gone wrong" or something similar.

Yeah I see that now, and also is much clearer with my above post about us smashing terminology. As I said above, I never tried upgrading Ubuntu, I always did a reinstall. Also to be quite honest, while I encounter Ubuntu installs at work... on my personal systems I try to steer clear of them. Mint is the only exception I'd make.

Fedora has a support cycle of 13 months (or better until current version+2 is released + 1 month), Ubuntu has 5 years for LTS versions and 9 months for interim versions.

Thanks for the correction on the Fedora releases. Not sure why i was thinking 18 months, but you're right it is 12. LTS releases I knew were 5yrs, but weren't the interim releases 2yrs like..not too long ago? Or did I imagine that? I didn't think they had always been 9 months o.O

[Ericg]

That's stupid. Upgrades to new release versions (i.e. not alphas!) of properly supported Linux distributions do not brick systems.

For Arch users (if they pay attention to archlinux.org news), Gentoo users, or Fedora users via fedup... I agree, no brick-age. But the forums seem to be saying Ubuntu upgrades go straight to hell

[Alejandro Nova]

Screw "upgrades".

The right thing for me is: let's put /home on a separate partition, and wipe / and /boot while installing fresh copies of $DISTRO. When $DISTRO wants to create an user, you give $DISTRO your actual username, you keep using an unique username and your data and settings are not affected.

BTW, I've managed to send Ubuntu systems to hell with much less than a full system upgrade. A KDE point release upgrade, when Kubuntu-Backports conflicted with the Ubuntu main repositories, was enough to kill an Ubuntu system. That's why I don't use Ubuntu.

[Ericg]

BTW, I've managed to send Ubuntu systems to hell with much less than a full system upgrade. A KDE point release upgrade, when Kubuntu-Backports conflicted with the Ubuntu main repositories, was enough to kill an Ubuntu system. That's why I don't use Ubuntu.

Interesting that it occured at all.. with apt pinning support, I'd just assume that Backports would be given priority and that'd be end of it

[dee.]

Screw "upgrades".

The right thing for me is: let's put /home on a separate partition, and wipe / and /boot while installing fresh copies of $DISTRO. When $DISTRO wants to create an user, you give $DISTRO your actual username, you keep using an unique username and your data and settings are not affected.

Except for installed software. Mint allows backing up the software selection, but that only affects packages from the distro repositories, so any software that are installed outside of the distro package manager (games, self-compiled packages, etc.) need to be reinstalled manually.

I guess you could install all such software on a separate partition (I've taken to installing all games and such on a separate directory under /home) but there's still going to be the hassle of manually adding all menu shortcuts back (I guess you could come up with some kind of fancy scripting solution for that but who has the time or energy for that...)

[Vim_User]

LTS releases I knew were 5yrs, but weren't the interim releases 2yrs like..not too long ago? Or did I imagine that? I didn't think they had always been 9 months o.O

They had 18 months before the shortened the support.

Interesting that it occured at all.. with apt pinning support, I'd just assume that Backports would be given priority and that'd be end of it

Not sure about Ubuntu, but backports in Debian by default has a lower priority that the manin repositories, which is quite logical. Otherwise you would upgrade all packages to the newer ones from backports, which is not what most people want if they just want to use a newer kernel.