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?
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 installdon’t use Ubuntu anymore.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
NixOS with impermanence. Every reboot is a fresh install.
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.
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.
rpm-ostree upgradeis enough on uBlue, as system release upgrades are automatically staged and just like normal updates.
rpm-ostree rebasemay be needed on Fedora AtomicUse a well versioned package manager guys.
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.
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!
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.
Wait for a bugfix release after a major release. Then upgrade.
need moar bugs fixed, just to be safe
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.
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.
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*
NixOS.
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.
