I have been using Fedora as my primary distribution since very long. One thing that bothers me is its relatively short life cycle. I install its latest release, restore my backup, customize the applications, take a sigh of relief but by then the new release is just around the corner.Fedora has a comparatively short life  cycle: version X is maintained until  one month after version X+2 is  released. With 6 months between  releases, the maintenance period is a  very short 13 months for each version. WikipediaOnce I used pre-upgrade when moving from Fedora 9 to 10. It didn't work smoothly. The new upgraded Fedora was using the old kernel images of Fedora 9. Took me long to figure it out and I had to use live usb to fix it. Since then I decided not to use pre-upgrade or Upgrade an existing installation option. I had some hiccups with applications too.Using fresh install seems safer. But now I have to backup all data, along with my scripts and rc files and restore it again. This takes time along with installing apps that are not installed by default and removing not-required apps.Main problem is customization settings of each application. From Firefox only, I would have to export saved passwords, bookmarks, saved sessions, preferences of different extensions, etc. Some other applications do not provide option of save/export settings at all. So I have to configure each one manually.All in all, upgrading to latest release takes time, even longer if my net connection goes down for some reason. Each time I upgrade, I cannot take it out my mind that within few months a new release will be knocking my door, and I will have to repeat the whole exercise again.What could be a painless and easy procedure to take backups of all data and to restore it? I would prefer a command line solution.How can I preserve settings of applications, if they do not provide an option to export settings?If you are Fedora user, what do you do to keep up with its frequent releases?How can I make this whole procedure faster and less painful? Its the amount of time and efforts that an upgrade takes altogether which made me post this question. How can I make my life easier?
How should I deal with Fedora's short life cycle?
fedora;package management;upgrade
I use an external drive, where I backup some of my folders and dotfiles with rsync -avz once the first snapshot is taken, it only needs very little data to move onto the external drive for backups.Pretty much all of that information is stored in a dotfile or in some dotdirectory. All you need to do, is backup those directories. That's what I do anyway, and it's been working for years. Keep in mind however, that sometimes a newer version won't play nice with the older config files, so it's not guaranteed to work every single time.It all depends on what big of a change the next release is. For instance, when the file systems don't change, I don't see a reason to re-install anymore. It was all different back when FC6 was around. Upgrading was a pain, and I usually made fresh installs back then.From Fedora 8 onward, preupgrade was working fine, I didn't have had any issues with it. I did however a fresh install for Fedora 13, since I wanted all my hard drives to be formatted in ext4. Other than that, upgrading to latest version of Fedora usually works well. As of this edit, I've recently upgraded to Fedora 24. By now, the upgrade process with dnf goes smothly, although I think there is room for improvement. Generally, problems only arise when the upgrade process is aborted mid-install, or mid-cleanup.Usually, keep somewhat track, of what changes you do to the system. What files in /etc/ you changed, what programs you compiled yourself, or what libs you put into /usr/lib/ yourself, etc. This makes life much easier, as well as a backup, that is constantly kept up to date. Preupgrade works fine by now, but when you want to change The file system or so, there's no way around reinstalling. The upgrade guide of Fedora will advice you when you should indeed reinstall instead of doing an upgrade. The PreUpgrade manual says, it's possible to upgrade from F11 directly to F13, for example. I would advice against it. Since older Fedoras aren't upgraded, the PreUpgrade package is most likely outdated. With the latest versions and the newer upgrade processes with dnf and the system-upgrade plugin, this isn't as much of an issue, really. Conflicting file versions are stored with the extension .rpmsave, and you can then later resolve these issues with rpmconf -a.This won't help, but when you're a OpenBSD user, you need to make most changes manually and you can't upgrade to the latest release from any other than the previous one.A word of warning: What might somewhat ruin your day, are 3rd party repositories that aren't ready for the new release yet. This happens almost routinely with dropbox, and even with RPMfusion. It takes RPMfusion about two weeks to get in sync with the new release, but sometimes four moths for Dropbox to fix their repos. So, when you're using something like RPMfusion, etc. I advice checking if they're ready. Otherwise waiting another week or two won't really hurt, and it'll save you a lot of headaches. Especially when dealing with nVidia drivers and such.