Upgrading from Fedora 23 to Fedora 24

· 3 min read

For my main workstation, I’ve been running linux for about 8 or 9 years now and specifically Fedora for the past 3. I’ve tried to keep my workstation kernel around about the same version as the systems I maintain in the datacentre, typically just slightly ahead. This helps relate my workstation experience to the datacentre, and also keeps me slightly ahead of the learning curve getting experience with the new tools that come in, or figuring out workarounds prior to needing to do them in production. Running CentOS previously worked well, but upgrading was always a bit of a risk for me. I made sure my backup-fu was strong, and spent a fair bit of time reinstalling display drivers and dealing with other upgrade nuances. During the dawn of the Fedora.next initiative, I made the switch to Fedora. I was thrilled, and honestly a little surprised, to be getting similar stability and predictability while being able to take advantage of the new developments in a more modern kernel. Way to go Fedora team! I’ve had a flawless experience with this distro, I can say I’m quite happy with it.

Fast forward a few release cycles and my upgrade anxiety is still present. I’ve either reconfigured a workstation or bought a new one so my last few upgrades were outright reinstalls of the newest version. When Fedora 24 was released, I upgraded my two fairly vanilla configured laptops from F23 to F24 quite easily using Fedora magazines’ upgrade guide. The process was smooth, and it was my first experience doing major release upgrades. Yet, I’ve left my main workstation with incredible amounts of tweaking alone – until today. With Fedora 25 on the horizon and F23 soon to be out of support, it was time to upgrade. Today I did that upgrade, and it went as flawless as my laptops, despite all the extra tweaks and packages I’ve added. It was also really quick, I was done in about 30 minutes. Taking inventory of my system, it appears that everything is working just as I had it before… which is an amazing experience (and relief!) compared to my previous upgrades with CentOS. I didn’t have any package conflicts, my applications come up exactly as I had them configured before, my VM infrastructure environment is behaving as expected, and even my printer is still working :). That’s about as flawless of an experience as one can get.

As I write this blog post, my upgrade anxiety is starting to fade, and I feel like I need to send a case of beer or wine to the Fedora team who’s worked so hard on this process. Kudos folks! You’ve saved me a countless number of steps. It’s pretty impressive that I was able to do this on two commands:

12:54-aludwar@hostname:~$ history
...
12045  sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=24
12046  sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot
...

The only two issues I’ve come across thus far are:

14:06-aludwar@hostname:~$ cat .local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/drop-down-terminal\@gs-extensions.zzrough.org/metadata.json 
{
 "_generated": "Generated by SweetTooth, do not edit", 
 "description": "Drop down terminal toggled by a keystroke (the key above tab by default) for advanced users.", 
 "id": "drop-down-terminal", 
 "name": "Drop Down Terminal", 
 "shell-version": [
 "3.10", 
 "3.12", 
 "3.11.90", 
 "3.11.91", 
 "3.11.92", 
 "3.14", 
 "3.13.4", 
 "3.13.90", 
 "3.13.92", 
 "3.13.3", 
 "3.13.91", 
 "3.16", 
 "3.18", 
 "3.17.90", 
 "3.17.91", 
 "3.17.92",
 "3.20.4"      <--- Added
 ], 
 "url": "https://github.com/zzrough/gs-extensions-drop-down-terminal", 
 "uuid": "drop-down-terminal@gs-extensions.zzrough.org", 
 "version": 19
}

Happy upgrading!