1 What in the world is "Fedora Package Updater" and why are you trying to use it? I, for one, have no idea what you are talking about, and computers in my house were running Fedora for years. Just use yum already.

2 I thought to myself "surely there is a decent GUI tool for performing updates thes days", and after hunting about the menus a bit, found this... thing. 

It looks and acts like it came straight out of Red Hat 6.2.

As you say, I shall use yum.  Not that I'm overly fond of yum either, but it does work.

3 The point being (as much as I have a point) that someone bothered to sit down and write a really bad package manager and then someone else made it the only one available to the casual user in Fedora Core 6.  (Well, at least under KDE.  Maybe there's something decent in Gnome.)

That second someone in particular needs to be hunted down and slapped with a wet fish.

While I'm bitching about Fedora, Core 6 still hasn't replace the "just fucking install everything" button, and even if you go through the menus trying to choose everything, you inevitably end up with strange gaps in your install.  And of course, if you try to complete your install afterwards, you run into this pile of crap.

I'd just run CentOS, but its clock goes berserk under VMWare Server.

4 OK. I looked at that thing. When that thing starts, it pretends to be Pup, in reality it's Pirut in Pup compatibility mode. My Dear God. The "rpm -qi --changelog pirut" shows that Jeremy was kicking it. I guess there were requests for GUI and the "community" was unable to deliver. I heard that gyum is, if anything, worse than Pirut. GUI people scare me.

5 Hmmmm .... synaptic works fine for me.

And the idiot-gui update manager in ubuntu is actually rather smart about not screwing the pooch by upgrading past the version your distro is currently on.

Since I use an encrypted root and home on my desktop machine, I have to be careful about updating ... one bad move and I'll have to spend hours fixing my /boot directory....

6 I don't think I've used the Redhat installer since about version 7 ?

apt / synaptic works pretty much. I've used yum since Core 3 with the appropriate extra repositories.

Pup and pirut are just too terrible for words.