Fedora 35 Upgrade Experience

Project Discussion
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Worst Fedora release ever.

I sat down last night to upgrade my laptop to Fedora 35 using the command line process, as I have done many releases prior. I was electric with the excitement of knowing that this would be a long night of burrowing into the innards of the latest release. Maybe grub would fail to install properly, prompting a dash to build a recovery USB drive (F31). Or maybe the latest pipewire would require stalking down an obscure configuration file option (F33). I hit enter on the update command and walked away, confident that tonight would be no ordinary night.

I returned a couple of hours later to find the luks prompt blinking at me. I dutifully pecked in my password, then logged into Gnome, and nothing. All of my desktop applications were there and functioning. I tested my online accounts and VPN, no problems. I fired up a few media sites, sound and video worked perfectly. Even all of my self-built Gnome extensions operated to perfection. Frantic, I tried rebooting, thinking that somehow that would rearrange the electrons into some sort of disorder that would require expert intervention. But again, every thing just came up normal.

The realization that there would be no spelunking into obscure configuration files or delving into arcane kernel boot parameters overwhelmed me. This would not be a late night technical extravaganza, it would be an early bedtime. And in the morning, I would have nary a story to tell of my upgrade adventures, and would have to console myself with merely slogging through another normal working day.

I trudged to the kitchen where I soothed myself with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s before tossing myself in bed for a fitful sleep. Thanks for nothing Fedora 35.

But as I lay there, I started thinking. That upgrade process was smooth. Too smooth. Could it be that the whole upgrade was an elaborate ruse? A simulation that merely translates the F34’s into F35’s? The F35 is a warplane built by Lockheed Martin who makes some of the most advanced simulators in the world. Coincidence? I think not.

I will be delving into this rich seam in the coming days.

Marty

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Hello @mwesley ,
Welcome to the discussion area. Thank you for the entertaining (if somewhat painful reminder of days gone not so past) post. You really ought to make it a Fedora Magazine story, we don’t get many human oriented ones published, and I think there are good reasons to share humor.

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I can so relate to that.

In the old times (I started with Fedora Core 6) every upgrade felt like Christmas. You prepared for it in advance, allocated time, got a bucket of coffee and snacks ready and embarked on the adventure. Risky but exciting, challenging but with a feeling of accomplishment in the end.

Bonus points for being able to recover from accidentally removing the whole glibc when cleaning up duplicate packages.

And now - half an hour and it just works?!

That’s why now I am more involved in the CI. If you can not break the system, break the infrastructure which builds it :slight_smile: