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

and why do you upgrade like that?

  • Zucca@sopuli.xyz
    3·
    7 months ago

    Rolling with Gentoo here. Reinstall is not performed even when complete hardware upgrade has been done.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 months ago

      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.

  • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
    3·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    2·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
      1·
      7 months ago

      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.

  • pop@lemmy.ml
    2·
    7 months ago

    Wait for a bugfix release after a major release. Then upgrade.

    need moar bugs fixed, just to be safe

  • danielfgom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • ik5pvx@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    1·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      A rolling release distro is basically a requirement for me. I abhor major release upgrades. They’re usually labor intensive and often break things.

  • Peffse@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    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!

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      1·
      7 months ago

      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.