Getting new laptop today... F12 Beta or wait for full release?

[Richard Shaw]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:
> Richard Shaw wrote:
>>
>> My wife is getting a new laptop[1] today and I don't want to put F11
>> on it as F12 is almost here. At the same time, I don't want to leave
>> Vista on it any longer than I have to.
>>
>> Are there any serious issues with F12 Beta that I should wait for the
>> full release?
>
> If having a functional system is important, as in you use it for something
> which needs to work, I would go F11 and upgrade not less than two weeks
> after the official release. New releases tend to have rough edges knocked
> off for a bit. Actually, F11 is an issue right now, if you install from DVD
> and then try to upgrade, you find that dependencies are utterly borked. If
> you like cutting edge to the point that you can tolerate certainty that
> there will be issues, go F12 daily, that, at least, will update.
>
> Other note, LKML indicates that multiple people are seeing regressions in
> disk performance with 2.6.3[012], if that is important to you.

Well I ended up installing RC4 and everything went smoothly. The only
issues so far is unstable hibernate and sleep (I think it's an AMD
780G chipset) but I'm not sure if it's a chipset or video driver
(radeon) issue. Also minor wireless issues. It uses the ath9k driver
and suffers from some instability and poor wireless strength. It
hasn't caused any issues with internet access as it's works faster
than our DSL but I have noticed issues with trying to copy files or do
backups (via BackupPC).

In reviewing the kernel bugzilla entries it looks like the wireless
issues will be resolved at some point so overall I would still
recommend this laptop.

Richard