Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 12.169.163.241]
on May 08, 2008 07:58 PM
Agreed. Debian has long been the champion of reliable upgrades- you just don't need to do a clean installation, unless you've gone out of your way to hork your system by using oddball third-party repos, or have manually muddled with the package manager and forced it to do bad things. Clean installations are skanky Windows artifacts, because each Windows release is such a drastic change, and because Windows rapidly bit-rots. The filesystem fragments, and it gets bogged down with weird junk. This doesn't happen on Linux, which on a well-administered system gets better with time. Another reason for preferring a clean installation is the spring-cleaning impulse, like your Linux PC needs to have the attic cleaned and the windows washed and the rugs taken outside and beaten. Unless your system is seriously messed-up, it's just not necessary. Even a very messed-up Linux system can be fixed; it's just a question of which is faster- fixing or re-installing.
A clean installation takes more than one hour. First of all it's longer than that to download the ISO. Then after installation you need to upgrade it to pick up changes after the ISO was released. Then you have to reinstall whatever applications don't come in the default installation, and you may get bitten by changes in configuration file options or file locations. If you keep /home on a separate partition your data won't be affected, but you'll need to restore /etc from backup. Unless you keep that on a separate partition as well.
Sure, I know lots of Ubuntu fans claim a long streak of successful upgrades, but I'm skeptical- in my own experience and my customer's, they fail as often as they work. I do like adding the dist-upgrade option to the updater, that's a nice time-saver.
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Re: Ubuntu 8.04: Upgrade or clean install?
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 12.169.163.241] on May 08, 2008 07:58 PMA clean installation takes more than one hour. First of all it's longer than that to download the ISO. Then after installation you need to upgrade it to pick up changes after the ISO was released. Then you have to reinstall whatever applications don't come in the default installation, and you may get bitten by changes in configuration file options or file locations. If you keep /home on a separate partition your data won't be affected, but you'll need to restore /etc from backup. Unless you keep that on a separate partition as well.
Sure, I know lots of Ubuntu fans claim a long streak of successful upgrades, but I'm skeptical- in my own experience and my customer's, they fail as often as they work. I do like adding the dist-upgrade option to the updater, that's a nice time-saver.
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