Fedora 9 (upgrade) stinks

Red Hat 9 was the last free version of Red Hat if I remember correctly. Once upon a time, The Red Hat name was the name in open source. They went enterprise and made a name for themselves. I use Red Hat products every day at work.

At home, I use Fedora products. The latest version of Fedora is Fedora 9. It is riddled with beta software and poorly thought out construction. I've had several pieces of software break either in whole or in part since Fedora 8. It has become clear to me that the Fedora name has become a beta test of Red Hat's next release. I imagine that Red Hat 6 will look very much like Fedora 9 with a few bug fixes and a minor face lift.

Firefox 3 is beta and useful. It has some interesting changes and some annoying ones. Not a bad choice for a new OS output.

KDE 4 is beta and is completely useless on Fedora 9. KTTSmgr worked fine on Fedora 8. After an upgrade, it is broken to the point it no longer works. It isn't like I don't need this software, or that it is just one of the conveniences of computing. KTTS is the software that reads text to me aloud. I need that as much as I need a functioning keyboard or monitor.

Same is true with KDE itself. All I have to do is select a different theme and X collapse.

It is highly frustrating that Fedora is pulling this kind of crap. I sit at my desk looking at an error on my screen and wonder if I should have tried a full install from scratch. That does seem to fix most things wrong with upgraded units. However, when I think about the effort involved in that effort, I wonder why I'm not going to Ubuntu, a distro I've had good luck with in the past and know has a history working upgrades.

So, where does this leave me? I'm typing on a computer that is partially broken and no idea if it will ever get fixed. When i download an official release of an operating system, I want something that works. If I want cutting edge, I'll go looking for it. I complained when Fedora waited like six months to go from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0. Those were real releases of the software, not betas.