Is it dangerous to use Fedora 14 until 2012.01.01?

Question

I have three PC's running Fedora 14 at home, and I'm far away from home until 2012.01.01. When I get home, I plan to migrate them to Scientific Linux 6.1, which has longer support time.

Since Fedora 14 isn't maintained after 2011.12.08, is it a security threat to use it after that? The PC's are only used for simple purposes, e.g. web browsing, email, etc. The web browser is Google Chrome, and I installed the Web of Trust plugin a long time ago to add a small amount of browsing security.

Should I find a way to install Scientific Linux 6.1, or is using an unsupported distro for 24 days not a major security problem? I don't want to run dist-upgrade via SSH because it could kill the OS.

Answer 1

Except for that urging feeling that I should upgrade the computers, I wouldn't see any reason to hurry. For home use security is not that much of a concern... Are you running those machines as servers of some sort? Anyway 24 days is like nothing so don't worry too much about it. Being out of support is just like stop installing updates. It doesn't mean things will start breaking (they would have broken already) or vulnerabilities will start to appear (they have been there already). It's just a matter if someone is watching and to wait for an exploit to be discovered in that tiny time frame and launch an attack against you. You should ask yourself, seriously, do you know such a person?