Fedora Devs Discuss Changing Their Release Scheduling, Maybe One Big Release Per Year

[bitman]

Two words: old packages.

[nomadewolf]

Why not a rolling release?

By the way folks, one of the reasons I run Mac OS on my personal laptop is that Idon'thave to deal with the horror of new releases every six months that screw everything up on your system. I don't have such problems even when running Apples betas. Many distros since I made the change (2008), have actually improved things a bit but Fedora is really still in the dark ages from what I can see.

A couple of points to consider:

• Although releases come out every six months, you're not forced to upgrade...
• Unlike other OSes, Linux allows you to set a different /home partition that you can keep after each upgrade
• Upgrading is recommended at least once a year is actually good since as time goes by, your system gets cluttered and slows down over time
• This is my personal perception but rolling releases get way less press: more at the launch, but over time they get left aside

[nanonyme]

Overall likely impact is significantly delayed hardware support for AMD as LLVM is most likely not included in these dot releases. I‘m personally going to look for another distro if that happens

[jakubo]

if it meant that thr devs would have less overhead with releases and had more time to work on upstream until it would be clear what packages will end up in the final release... why not..? but as someone mentioned already: old packages. if mesa comes out every half a year... fedora would comepletely miss one out? not testing it? could have pros and cons. i think people will look for something stable, performant and usable. so its the quality and not the PR that is important.
so maybe 1 RR and 1 release per year would be a good compromise.
by the way... is there actually something like a janitor tool, that can save modified scripts and/or replace / reinstall / change installations and settings to a clean install without actually having to wipe everything? You know... just comparing it to how a fresh install would look like with all the new tools, configs and everything. im not sure for instance that if you had to fix something by reinstalling it but dont need it anymore it will get removed by autoremove atsome point? and no im not keen on controlling every package that i have ever installed manually... so to really just get rid of deprecated garbage,activating new flags and using new configs and have a fresh system without wiping all the disk...

[starshipeleven]

Why not a rolling release?

By the way folks, one of the reasons I run Mac OS on my personal laptop is that Idon'thave to deal with the horror of new releases every six months that screw everything up on your system. I don't have such problems even when running Apples betas. Many distros since I made the change (2008), have actually improved things a bit but Fedora is really still in the dark ages from what I can see.

OpenSUSE Leap has yearly releases and the upgrades don't fuck up anything if you do them from the installer.

[starshipeleven]

Upgrading is recommended at least once a year is actually good since as time goes by, your system gets cluttered and slows down over time

Nope. Not true even on WIndows 7 and later.

[eidolon]

• This is my personal perception but rolling releases get way less press: more at the launch, but over time they get left aside

That's a fair assessment in general, but I don't think Arch Linux is necessarily being left behind in terms of actual distro mindshare. What Arch Linux doesn't get in release coverage is probably made up for in enthusiastic word of mouth (e.g. the joke "Q: How do you know if someone is using Arch Linux? A: They'll tell you.").

Also, using DistroWatch.com as an example, while Arch Linux hasn't seen an addition to DistroWatch.com's "Latest News and Updates" since 2012, Manjaro, KaOS, Sabayon, and Calculate Linux, amongst other rolling-release distros, receive "Latest News and Updates" additions pretty regularly. I don't know if those latter communities put more effort into promoting the periodic refreshes of their install media.

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My concern is that a more conservative release schedule might unintentionally engender more conservatively-paced updates and changes during a release's lifetime, which impacts both "features" and "first" of Fedora's four foundations.

[nomadewolf]

Nope. Not true even on WIndows 7 and later.

Windows 7 and later are way more resistant to that effect.
If you can afford an SSD, you can even last 2 to 4 years on good performance (depending on your case).
But in the end, as you install/uninstall stuff, it loses performance.
The more you do it, the faster it degrades.

Due to the six month upgrade cicle, i hardly ever encounter performance issues in my Linux machines.

[Mystro256]

I'm in favor as well, as long as it does not affect them from shipping the latest software versions of their packages. Especially for kernel, Mesa, X, Wayland, Gnome Shell and Plasma. As it is right now Fedora is starting to slip in some packages, most notably in those previously mentioned.

But a rolling release is a no go for me.

X and the kernel has never "slipped" from my experience. Although with that said, X and GNOME always freeze major versions for each release to avoid breakage. This is less of an issue now that GTK3 is in LTS and X is getting less frequent updates. They should keep the rest of gnome up to date imho, providing newer versions won't require a newer version of gtk (i.e. when gtk4 comes out).

Although, Mesa and LLVM has definitely slipped more recently.

[starshipeleven]

Windows 7 and later are way more resistant to that effect.
If you can afford an SSD, you can even last 2 to 4 years on good performance (depending on your case).
But in the end, as you install/uninstall stuff, it loses performance.
The more you do it, the faster it degrades.

No. This was true for XP due to technical reasons (windows registry was designed like crap), but in later Win OSs that got fixed. People keep repeating the same thing but it is now a myth.

On linux that never happened, period.

If your system (linux or win7+) is slowing down it's because you have installed stuff that is constantly running and eating resources, and the cure is nuking that software, not reinstalling. (well sure you can also reinstall, but that's a bit excessive)

Due to the six month upgrade cicle, i hardly ever encounter performance issues in my Linux machines.

Did you actually try with a slower upgrade cycle too?