Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat Fedora Core 1 Status Update: What I [am starting to] hate about Fedora is the speed at which new versions of the OS are released. This isn’t all that bad but it does mean that older versions will have support dropped rather quickly. It’s been a little over a year since Fedora Core 1 beta came out and soon it will be fazed out of support (except by the fedora legacy project, assuming that there is community support). FC 1 came out in November and it’s support will be cancelled the following September.

So, what are the options? Well, if you are most comfortable with Red Hat (like me) then here are the main options:
[1] Upgrade frequently. Every 5-6 months upgrade from Fedora Core x to Fedora Core x+1.
[2] Buy a commercially supported Red Hat distribution such as Red Hat (Desktop|Enterprise).
[3] Use a knock off of a commercially supported Red Hat distribution such as White Box or Tao Linux.
[4] Use a knock off of Fedora that may be supported by another organization or an active community. This seems dubious but check out cobind for an example. This may be the best cost/performance option.
[5] Switch to another distribution. I haven’t used Mandrake recently but it used to be just a repackaged version of Red Hat. I think it still has close roots to Red Hat though. SuSe is likely the next closest since it uses the RPM for software installation. If you like the Red Hat installation process you will probably hate Debian because it just plain stinks. Besides being hard to install it’s quite different from Red Hat/Fedora in other ways. Gentoo and Slackware also differ drastically from Red Hat and will require a steep learning curve.

So which to choose? If retraining is an option, probably number 5. If you don’t/can’t/won’t learn a new distribution and want to stay in the cheap, try option 4 or 1. If you don’t mind frequent upgrades, choose 1. If you have money to spend ($70 for desktop, $400 – $1,500 for enterprise) choose option 2. I don’t yet know what I’m going to do but I feel a decision is eminent and necessary.

I’ll try out some other distros and report what I find. I feel like I’m up against a brick wall in this.