In February I’ll be buying a laptop and slapping Fedora Core 4 on it. Unfortunately, it seems that FC 5 will be officially released in March, which means that a month after installation, I’ll have to install again from scratch.
The FC solution is to create a separate partition for /home, leave user data on there while installing FC 5 will wipe out everything else. Well, duh!
Here’s a fedora forum and a slashdot discussion about FC 5 including Mono .
Windows users are facing a similar dilemma about how to plan for upgrade to Windows Vista. One comforting thing about the Windows Home Edition scare (see below) is to see that MS does a pretty good job establishing a timetable for how long each OS will be supported. As long as you do your research, you can prepare yourself.