Upgrade vs Fresh install vs Distro

[Riff]

I've been using Fedora quite happily for maybe 6 months or so now, having moved from a year of Ubuntu.

As Fedora moves from 12 to 13, I've had some issues with drivers and kernels etc, largely because of my own inexperience I suspect but also a bit of a fuzzy border between the different versions.

I experienced problems with Ubuntu with upgrades too and I've generally found that a fresh install is inherently more stable than an upgrade - but the caveat there is the trouble one has to go to in a) setting everything up and b) backing up and restoring important and valuable data.

I'm also getting deeply into CentOS, because I've got some projects I want to get to grips with and stability is important. In fact if I could I'd migrate almost all but my games machine to CentOS, but I can't get CentOS to run the way my Fedora "Ultimate Desktop" does (having used the guide here.)

I'm fortunate in having 3 PCs, one running XP for games and online DJing, one for CentOS as a learning platform and this one currently running Fed 12. I'm not yet ready to get rid of XP - Games just don't run so well in Wine (I've tried, honest) and I have a good book on CentOS, so that's pretty solid too...

I'm a self-confessed Linux newbie - I've struggled to get to grips with the command line (getting there slowly) and I have big gaps in my knowledge but it's coming together. This machine has had problems all week with upgrades affecting my machine - giving resolution issues and kernel problems to name just a couple.

So... I guess I don't have a "specific" question. Perhaps it's more philosophical but is it possible to get CentOS to do everything that Fedora 12 does without having to go through the trauma of upgrading every 6 months? Is it generally better to upgrade or reinstall from scratch? Am I using the right distro in Fedora? (I much prefer it to Ubuntu, I got to say)

all input welcome!

[falko]

Basically you can do all the stuff you do with Fedora with CentOS as well, but the problem is that sometimes packages that are available for Fedora aren't available for CentOS, so you either have to use a third-party repository or compile the stuff manually.

I don't use Fedora on any production system, so I can't tell whether it's better to upgrade or do a reinstall from scratch, but the impression that I got from my tests is that a reinstall "feels" better.

[Riff]

Originally Posted by falko

Basically you can do all the stuff you do with Fedora with CentOS as well, but the problem is that sometimes packages that are available for Fedora aren't available for CentOS, so you either have to use a third-party repository or compile the stuff manually.

I don't use Fedora on any production system, so I can't tell whether it's better to upgrade or do a reinstall from scratch, but the impression that I got from my tests is that a reinstall "feels" better.

Yeah I have tried using 3rd party repos for CentOS but there's still a lot of stuff missingand I've got such gaps in my knowledge I'm often struggle to understand the next move.

I wouldn't even like to try compiling stuff - I can't even get flash and java to run properly on CentOS