Fedora 18 was released this week and I finally got around to installing it today. To be honest, on either my laptop or desktop I have not really used Fedora much since Fedora 14. I have been incredibly happy with CentOS for over a year and a half now, and I (begrudgingly) accepted Windows 7 on my laptop. Today’s installation of Fedora 18 made me question my use of time. I switched jobs exactly 2 years ago and found myself in the precarious position of having little to no spare time.

I’m migrating away from Fedora as my desktop operating system. I’ve been testing CentOS 6 which was released recently and I feel I would be much more efficient using it instead of Fedora. I still have quite a few quirks to resolve, but I have no doubt I’ll find the solutions. I bought a new desktop some time ago with the intention of running virtualization, so I plan to still test and use Fedora time to time, but I can no longer keep up with the rate of change.

(Note: For the purpose of this post CentOS is equivalent to RHEL) It has been about 2 and 1/2 years since I built a dedicated server and chose CentOS instead of Fedora. Since I installed CentOS 5.1 I have used the upgrade process 4 times with no problems bringing me to version 5.5 with practically no re-installation, re-configuration or troubleshooting upgrade issues. This is the goal of enterprise linux. A long term stable solution with no major changes to preserve compatibility with every piece of software that was provided since it was released (in this case April 2007).

If you missed it there seems to be yet another debate going on about updates in Fedora. I don’t intend to rehash anything. Josh Boyer has a bit of an op-ed post which I think is a good read. Think of the issue in a simple scenario: Should Fedora 12, which was released in Nov 2009 with KDE 4.3 receive the recent KDE 4.4 update? Or should KDE 4.4 be reserved for Fedora 13 which will be released in June 2010?

As I mentioned previously, I run many sites on my web server. Yesterday I decided to clean up some sites that their owners had neglected or not used. One such site was running Apache Tomcat Java Server, which I did not care to leave running. Now I, like many users of commercial hosting plans, pay for cPanel/WHM which includes a myriad of options/configurations/settings to do almost everything on the server. Back in 2007, I had used the cPanel Addon to install Tomcat.