NewsForge: Why I Won’t Upgrade My Linux Distribution

“I’m not upgrading my Fedora Core 2 machine to Core 3, even
though the new version has been out for a couple of months. There’s
not anything wrong with FC3 itself, it’s just that system upgrades
are both a blessing and a curse. I guess that’s one of those dirty
little secrets every Linux user knows, but that none of us talks
about.

“There are plenty of valid reasons not to upgrade to the latest
release of your Linux distribution. You have to reapply all manner
of preferences, hunt around in the new Applications menus to find
where your programs have moved to and what they’re called this time
around, get used to new ways of doing the simplest tasks, and
there’s usually a new firewall subsystem to boot. But the one that
has always gotten under my skin is the fact that upgrading my
distro always breaks the add-on software I’ve installed
myself…”

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