when you upgrade an OS, do you clean install or upgrade?
clean install: you make a backup, nuke the computer, install a fresh upgraded copy of the distro you want from a live usb, copy your data again to the computer.
upgrade: you wait ‘till the distro’ developers release an upgrade you can directly install from your soon to be old distro, you use a command like sudo do-release-upgrade
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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