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
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’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.
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.
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.
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