I follow the official upgrade method. Can’t be bothered to mess around with anything more complicated than that. Besides, the devs probably understand the system better than I do, so there has to be a reason why that is the preferred way.
this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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This is my plan A. I'll only go to plan B if something goes wrong — which has happened to me a couple times. I tried to upgrade Ubuntu (LTS, I forget which version) years ago, but it failed hard. I still don't know why. It wasn't something I could figure out in half an hour, and it wasn't worth investing more time than that.
Come to think of it, it's possible all my upgrade woes came down to Nvidia drivers. It was a common problem on Suse (TW), to the point where I pinned my kernel version to avoid the frequent headaches. I'll try a rolling distro again when I switch to AMD, maybe.
Neither. I use a rolling release distro.
But if I have to use release based distros, I probably would clean install.
A rolling release distro is basically a requirement for me. I abhor major release upgrades. They're usually labor intensive and often break things.
Upgrade. It works perfectly fine and when it doesn’t figuring out what’s going on learns me something and several times has resulted in fix commits to the packages.
E: there’s some people saying they do clean installs on Ubuntu. They’re right that ubuntu breaks shit all the time but I’ve solved that by simply not using the bad distros.
I like you.
Upgrading Ubuntu LTS since 2014. It's always a good idea to read the release notes in order to know what's changed. In general LTS-to-LTS upgrades have been trouble-free.
Rolling with Gentoo here. Reinstall is not performed even when complete hardware upgrade has been done.
Well, I also use a rolling release distro, my disk died last week so I had to reinstall, so technically FULL hardware update might require a reinstall (safer than copying the root folder from one disk to another since the old one was bad), but yeah, before that I've replaced almost every piece of that laptop without a reinstall, even switched from Nvidia to AMD.
Well, yeah. Hard drive failure can force a reinstall. And with laptops there isn't usually another place for a hard drive, from where to restore the system.
Brainfart, I said laptop meant desktop, obviously didn't change the GPU on a laptop.
*Framework has entered the chat*
Depends on the distro. On Debian I upgrade cause I know it works well. On Ubuntu I always had issues after an upgrade so I ~~do a clean install~~ don't use Ubuntu anymore.
NixOS with impermanence. Every reboot is a fresh install.
Clean install on a new computer. Then upgrades until the computer gets retired. Debian at home, Ubuntu server at work.
I like playing with distros and other OSes in VMs, if the thing doesn't have a well defined upgrade procedure it gets ditched pretty soon.
Try out immutable distros like NixOS: that is stunning in upgrading.
'73
I tried once. Could not figure it out. I'll leave that to the young people.
Wait for a bugfix release after a major release. Then upgrade.
need moar bugs fixed, just to be safe
Wait for the distro to officially release an upgrade path. Only do a fresh install if it doesn't work.
On Windows however whenever I would get a new pc in which I was prepping for staff(I worked in IT) the first thing I'd do after unboxing it is a wipe of the factory Windows install and do a clean install with the latest ISO from Microsoft.
No bloatware, network managers, anti virus etc nonsense. We had all of our own stuff for that which applied via Group Policy anyway.
It depends. For Fedora I just do a in place upgrade. However once in a blue moon I do a reinstall.
rpm-ostree upgrade
is enough on uBlue, as system release upgrades are automatically staged and just like normal updates.
rpm-ostree rebase may be needed on Fedora Atomic
Use a well versioned package manager guys.
Upgrade. Have been upgrading my main machine since 2014.
I always upgrade as I can't deal with a clean install every so often. This warrants using a distro that does handle this well, though*. Which, thankfully, isn't a big deal as most distros support this anyways.
It depends on the distro. Some of them have some shitty ass upgrade process and it breaks shit, and others are just awesome. I personally use a rolling release so I don't have to worry about upgrades. I do get some issues here and there with some big upgrades, but nothing really major. I've only had to reinstall twice in the last 2.5 years.
I keep anything remotely important synced to my server and regularly nuke the whole thing.
I almost always prefer clean installation when possible, while making sure to backup important content from highly accessed folders like Desktop, Downloads and Documents (on Windows), for example.
It just feels nice! Nice and fresh.
NixOS.
+ Impermanence
Man just when I thought I got the hang of NixOS and setup everything already thanks to the new wiki. I dont think this is worth the trouble for me right now, but maybe in the future.
This is actually a question I'd like some opinions on!
I have a ton of headless servers running Debian that I just replace the sources.list for an upgrade. I imagine things are much more complicated when switches like X11 to Wayland happen, so all desktop environments get a wipe/install instead... But maybe I'm just making a lot of work for myself doing that!
Nah, regular upgrades should be fine for those too.
Wayland and X11 can exist in parallel. I have multiple desktop environments with some defaulting to Wayland and some still using X11. For my casual machine, I use XFCE most of the time ( X11 ) but have been toying around with the new COSMIC ( Wayland ). I switch back and forth.
So, the X11 on your system will not hold you back when you move to Wayland. Of course, at some point the old stuff is just cruft. So you do have to do a bit of janatorial from time to time.
I use a rolling release.
I upgrade Fedora from one version to another as doing a clean install would be a lot of work. Maybe I’m just too much of a rookie, but I don’t see the advantages of a clean install.
Even if I installed Fedora on a new computer, I’d just use my clonezilla backup if possible. But I haven’t tried it so I don’t know if this would work.
The only time I don't do a regular upgrade is for Windows Server. Too much weird shit happens. I like to keep my servers running clean.
It depends on how many versions I am away from the latest, and how much I've messed with the distro.
Usually I stay on an Ubuntu LTS and upgrade from LTS to LTS when that upgrade path is ready. I upgraded from 20.04 to 22.04 this way.
But this time I wanted Pipewire in 24.04, and didn't want to wait for a 22.04 to 24.04 upgrade to be ready. I'm using a bluetooth headset and Pulseaudio is pretty terrible at switching headset profiles. Between not wanting to upgrade an upgraded install, and having messed with Pulseaudio quite a bit trying to get it working, I went ahead and clean installed 24.04 and moved some configs over.
I upgrade when it's a distro that releases new versions regularly (for example Fedora with two releases per year). I obviously also upgrade rolling distributions.
Why? Because it's less work and I haven't had many problems with it.
I usually clean install long-term distros like RHEL (or RHEL-based). These don't always have a good upgrade path and I usually only use them on servers.
I usually roll on desktop/laptop and upgrade on headless. Just seems most practical.
I'm using a rolling release at the moment, but when I used a more stable release, I always did the upgrade (following the official instructions) because it's faster and more convenient.
I learned the hard way to always keep a backup of my important stuff, regardless of the OS.
The only time I redid a clean install was when I accidentally fucked up my entire filesystem's permissions.
I backup and then upgrade through the mechanism provided. Why? Lazy. I should take the time to set up a NAS and run most of /home from that, but never have been motivated enough to try it.
I usually let myself lag behind on Fedora to wait until the kinks have been worked out. I just jumped from 38 to 40 in an upgrade and totally regret it. Python is screwed up in distrobox and making problems, but I can roll back too.
Fedora, I usually wait 1-2 weeks for the last bugs to be found+fixed and extensions to catch up, and then just upgrade in-place. Haven't had a major upgrade problem for years now, it's mostly as smooth as any other offline update. And I don't feel like I have to reinstall the OS every few years on Linux either.
I always clean install. I have my stuff backed up properly. I’ll go through and make a checklist of frequently used software so I can start off on the right foot. I like that new fresh smell of free space.
Depends on the distro.
On my personal laptop with openSUSE, I have plenty confidence doing all kinds of upgrades and sidegrades (between Leap and Tumbleweed).
The package manager detects conflicts and makes me decide what to do with them. I've never seen the software or distro dependency definitions fuck up, it was always me making a wrong decision.
Well, and if I do make a wrong decision or anything else should go wrong during the upgrade, I can roll back to the BTRFS snapshot before.
On my work laptop, the best I can get is Kubuntu. Apt is much more fickle, since it doesn't have as clear of a concept of what constitutes a conflict, but also what a correct system should look like.
The whole packages feel much more fickle, too, because they've got all these custom patches, so you really don't want to accidentally mix different versions of packages, like might happen in an incomplete upgrade.
And of course, you get one chance at upgrading. If anything goes sideways, you better have your Live USB ready right away.
So, that's why I would prefer to install fresh right away. Of course, my workplace doesn't actually allow me to do that either. They really like to keep me on edge.
I upgrade in place more than once a week ( rolling release ).
I've got a desktop that got a dirty install of KDE Neon when the repositories first got put up (before there were isos). Been in-place upgrading it ever since.
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