It's only used for the initial installation from a trusted origin. While it looks scary, it's harmless. See: https://github.com/terrapkg/packages/discussions/7736#discus...

It's a community repository for Fedora. It works similar to RPMFusion: you can use it along the official repositories to grab software that's not available there. If you'd like to reduce the number of organizations you're directly depending on, you may choose to use their Fedora fork, with their own repositories (forked from Fedora's), called Ultramarine Linux [0].

[0]: https://ultramarine-linux.org/

Rawhide is the development branch of Fedora. Terra is a community rolling-release repository that provides additional software on top of Fedora, for both the Rawhide and stable versions of Fedora. They're not directly comparable.

To solve this, I personally simply wait a few weeks before updating Fedora versions! Generally that's a good idea not only because of RPMFusion, but specially because of the multitude of GNOME Extensions I use, some of which take a bit longer to update whenever there's a new GNOME release.

> I have enjoyed it thoroughly although I am a little skeptical how the upgrade process for Fedora will go when Fedora 44 eventually comes out.

I've updated my current system to every release from Fedora 36 through Fedora 43, and I've had minor issues twice (as in, things that were unexpected/annoying, but I was still able to boot, log in to a GUI, and use Firefox without any problems), but the other 5 updates had zero issues. The updates are usually so uneventful that once my server automatically upgraded to the next version (which is my fault because I misconfigured it), and I didn't even notice until 3 days later.

> One of the concerns is the package delays on the RPM Fusion repo. I've heard it can take weeks before updated packages are shipped, a package without a valid Fedora 44 compatible package will prevent the update from being installed.

I nearly always update the first week that a new release is available, and I have most of the RPM Fusion packages installed, bu I don't remember ever being held up by this. The RPM Fusion packages are often delayed behind the official Fedora ones, and this can lead to some annoying errors in dnf if you don't use the right flags, but usually this is only for a few days—I can only remember a week-long delay happening once. (And right after a new release is usually when RPM Fusion is the most up-to-date, since the main Fedora repos are frozen for a few days before a new release, giving RPM Fusion time to update)

> COPR is another can of worms, most people just recommend disabling all COPR packages before upgrading.

I definitely concur with this advice; COPR causes enough problems that I'd recommend avoiding it entirely unless it has something really important or your technically savvy enough to fix any problems yourself.

> What is the upgrade process like when lots of Terra packages are installed?

I only have two Terra packages installed, and I've only used it for a bit under two years, but I don't remember it ever causing any issues while upgrading.

This is why my current version is always (Fedora Latest - 1)