One thing I don't like about Fedora is slow security updates

January 31, 2016

I generally like Fedora, but there are things that they don't seem to do well. Unfortunately one of them is prompt security updates, especially for nominally supported but not current versions (such as Fedora 22 right now).

At the best of times I can generally expect a multi-day delay for security updates. Consider OpenSSL CVE-2016-0701. This was warned about in advance and announced on Thursday. Most distributions had immediate updates out that day (Ubuntu, for example). Fedora got an update out for Fedora 23 only on the weekend (I'm not clear if it became available Saturday or Sunday). It's not just OpenSSL, either; I've seen similar delays for OpenSSH, the kernel, and other things that I've heard security announcements about.

Worse is the current situation with Fedora 22, as far as I can see. I noticed this recently because I noticed that my Fedora 22 machine had not been rebooted in over 30 days. I assure you that there have been Linux kernel security issues in the past 30 days that apply to the Fedora 22 kernel, because Fedora 23 uses basically the same kernel and has had a series of kernel updates over that time. Yes, Fedora 22 is not the current version, but in theory it is still supported.

(Fedora 22 may also be missing other security updates. I normally don't really keep track of security issues to the level of checking whether I have a vulnerable package and whether it's been updated; that's something I delegate to my distribution. I notice kernels because I notice reboots being needed due to them.)

Of course Fedora never promised us Fedora users anything in particular. It's open source so I get to keep all of the pieces. I'm just glad that I only run Fedora on my personal machines, which are relatively locked down, and I don't have any Fedora servers.

(At this point I would strongly advise against running Fedora on servers for the obvious reasons. Use something like Debian, or Ubuntu if you have to and don't care about Canonical's increasingly questionable behavior.)

Written on 31 January 2016.
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Last modified: Sun Jan 31 20:55:22 2016
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