Why I don't use Fedora any more

The news that Wikipedia was in the process of switching away from Red Hat and Fedora—and to Ubuntu—has stirred up some Fedora folks. The relatively short, 13 month support cycle for Fedora releases was fingered as a major part of the problem in a gigantic thread on the fedora-devel mailing list. Some would like to see Fedora be supported for longer, so that it could be used in production environments, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Fedora has set out to do.
The idea of supporting Fedora beyond the standard "two releases plus one month", which should generally yield 13 months, is not new. It was, after all, the idea behind the Fedora Legacy project. Unfortunately, Fedora Legacy ceased operations at the end of 2006, largely due to a lack of interested package maintainers. So, calls for a "long term support" (LTS) version of Fedora are met with a fair amount of skepticism.
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Fedora is not meant for production use, nor for those who cannot upgrade at least yearly. It has an entirely different mission, which Jon Stanley sums up:
"Well, in all fairness, Fedora's stated goal is to advance the state of free software. You get that by being bleeding-edge. Unfortunately, being bleeding edge also means not being suitable for production environments - these are two fundamentally incompatible goals. This is why Red Hat Linux split into two - Fedora and RHEL. RHEL is a derivative distribution of Fedora."

lwn.net

Apologies for quoting a quote. It just gets the point across. I need to figure out how to indent inside a block quote. Something like that anyway.

We use in a position at work where people want to use Fedora for their desktops. The idea of being stuck with an OS for years on your desktop makes people weep these days. I have to agree. There are so many things that change from one month to the next in the world of computers that people are not willing to be stuck with something that doesn't at least try to keep up.

I know for a fact that some large companies use Fedora as a production OS. This is bad bad bad. It is like using a race car for hauling freight. Great things come out of race cars. You can think racing for things like struts, twin turbos, over head cams (may have come form diesel engines), rain resistant tread on tires, and heaven know what other innovations. Still, they are just not meant to move pallet loads of stuff around.

In April next year Ubuntu 12.04 LTS comes out. The LTS stands for long term support. That means security updates and long term support for base packages will continue until some time in 2017. The next LTS is supposed to over lap this time by several months. The real support, not the locked support or whatever they call catastrophic fixes only period that occurs the rest of the time.

At the house, I use Ubuntu. I've tossed around the idea of switching to Mint, but that brings it's own issues. Ubuntu has lousy upgrade ability. In the future, I'm will try to do full installs on my primary machine. When it boils down to it, I will use the next 12.04 LTS version of Ubuntu on my server and other machines for the five or so years it will be supported. It will be nice to put the last OS on my server. Upgrading a server has specific issues that I just don't feel like dealing with every 13 months. I wish more companies felt this way.

Why do companies take risks like this? Why is it a risk? It is a risk because something that you depend on may change to the point you can no longer perform upgrades. If you cannot perform upgrades and updates, you may be at risk of being hacked.

As far as why companies do it, why do companies do anything? Well, they don't want to spend the money for all the licensing. they already know Fedora or whatever distro is the issue. They needed the latest feature that the distro offered at the time that no one else had. etc.