On Fri, 2006-12-22 at 16:52 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote: > Well, you could always use the old kernel if the new one doesn't work. > (Quite a lot of distribution kernels don't work for me anyway, > on one or other of my machines.) > > I think the OP asked quite a pertinent question, > and I don't think anyone has given a very cogent answer. A more succinct question: why should you _ever_ replace a currently working kernel on existing hardware with anything that is not perfectly backwards compatible (i.e. more than bugfixes)? I'd like to stay current with firefox, evolution, and a couple of other things but don't understand the need to reinstall a kernel and new mostly untested device drivers just to get them. In the gazillion kernel revs that fedora has rolled out, I can't recall seeing one that made a noticeable improvement in anything that previously worked correctly and have had fairly bad luck with them breaking things that had worked before. When I get new hardware I don't mind fiddling with an up to date kernel with current drivers. I just don't see the point in having to do that every few months to keep a browser, word processor and email program up to date on an existing system. The point of emulating the stable unix API in the first place should be to isolate the kernel and standard libraries from application developement, so why can't we have distributions that keep them separate? Currently the distributions that try to keep the kernel stable don't keep the applications up to day and the ones that update everything break the kernel and drivers all the time. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
