I’ve had it with Fedora.

First off, installing from the Live CD, requires either repartitioning, or installing to free space on a drive. Upgrading a previous install is not an option.

Then installing from DVD media, allows you to custom partition your drive. However, if you leave the existing partition table intact and try to install, the installation quits if it determines a package is already installed. I’m not sure how the package is the same between FC6 and FC8, or if the installer is actually looking at individual files or libraries and finding software I had previously updated manually. I’m also not motivated to find out.

Honetly, the whole thing is as bad as Microsoft in terms of constant updates. Just today, pup reported 12 more — that’s on top of the 1 for firefox, and the 121+ post installation updates.

Their rpm’s might or might not be current, but how can you tell? Their versions, features and fixes are frequently (almost always?) different from those of the software developers. So at the end of the day, this is just exactly what you get from Microsoft updates — canned binaries you have to install based on faith.

As for firefox, Fedora even delivers this and all of its updates as rpms. Firefox’s internal updates don’t work in thes version. To make matters worse, you can’t even easily install the stock version from mozilla.org anymore because there is no libstdc++5 in the FC8 distribution anymore.

Add all of that to lack of mp3 support, no xmms, no Evolution Exchange support without recompiling, no Windows audio codecs, no ethereal, and difficulties installing VMWare workstation with the supplied kernel. I write all this and wonder why I even bothered in the first place.

Don’t even get me started on SELinux…