Fedora Core 5: 8/10 points
I just did an upgrade of my laptop (a Thinkpad T43) from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5, using the yum package manager. Instructions here.
This has been the most hassle-free upgrade since Debian. Points to consider:
- Remove the jpackage repositories, if you were using them. The relevant packages seem to have become part of Fedora.
- You can upgrade Fedora Core (core) and packages from the Livna repositories in one pass.
- Yes, it does take a bit too much time.
In terms of after-upgrade pain, in typical RedHat fashion, suspend/resume is broken with the latest kernels, so I'm running on the same old Fedora Core 4 kernel that I've been using in a while. Overall, FC5 feels snappier than FC4; it seems like some major memory hogs might have been removed. NetworkManager now supports Wireless Protected Access (and the necessary infrastructure is installed by default); that's a very welcome addition, and I've reconfigured my access point.
My favorite text editor (jed) is included in a version that deals with utf-8, so I've finally switched to a native utf-8 environment for all I do. This particular update required a one-line change to a custom SLang script that I use for editing e-mail, but that's not to blame on the distribution. Overall, the switch from iso-8859-15 to utf-8 was limited to putting a different system default locale into /etc/sysconfig/i18n, and removing some iso-latin specific stuff from my .jedrc and my .Xresources.
Overall rating: 8/10 points; I don't get why Redhat isn't able to consistently support suspend/resume on one of the more common laptop platforms around.
