The Real Experience: Let's talk about some real experience which I had while upgrading my 6 months old Fedora 10 based media center PC. I popped in the DVD and booted my machine with it. It asked me for the upgrade and I continued. It took around an hour and fifteen minute to do the complete upgrade. Once done, it rebooted me to the new Fedora 11 OS, it suddenly dropped me to a text shell. For some unknown reason, it had destroyed my nVIDIA driver for the graphics card. Thats why it was not able to run the XWindow. A simple yum install on nVIDIA did the trick and I got my graphical display back.

I then checked if it automatically has upgraded my file system and found it had not. Later I found I hadn't pass 'ext4migrate' parameter to anaconda while booting from the installation DVD, which is why it didn't happen. I don't understand why the developers can't have a graphical option inside the anaconda installer for setting this upgrade uption. Is it that difficult? I also found that ext4 is backward compatible, so you need not exactly convert your partition. Rather just a remounting of your partition in ext4 will make the difference. In such a case, the old files will remain as ext3 and the new files created on the file system will be able to use the benefits of ext4. You can also run tune2fs to convert the file system completely. The following set of commands helped:

1 umount /dev/sdxy (where sdxy is the ext3 partition you are about to convert to ext4)
2. tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sdxy (converting into Ext4)
3 fsck -pf /dev/sdxy
4 mount -t ext4 /dev/sdxy /mount

After doing this, I tried checking my existing applications and found that all the applications that I have downloaded either from livna or any other repository except Fedora 10 repository had either stopped working or are malfunctioning. Some examples were mplayer, ffmpeg codac, weather-wallpaper, Compiz-fusion, emerald, and even my MythTV was not working.

As ffmpeg was missing, I was not even able to play movies and music on my media center. That was a bad experience. Again a set of yum install and yum update did the trick and I was able to get at least mplayer back, the video and audio codacs and compiz-fusion. But to my surprise, MythTV was still not working even after a complete uninstall and reinstall of the application. I am still trying that one out. And even don't know when the upgrade process will be smart enough to take care of all such issues. Overall, it's not very easy to fix things here and a new Linux user will have a hard time configuring all these.

Bottomline: Fedora 11 has lots of changes that make it more robust and stable. But if you see it from an end user point of view it has nothing, but the new artwork.