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?

  • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
    46·
    6 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.

    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      This is my plan A. I’ll only go to plan B if something goes wrong — which has happened to me a couple times. I tried to upgrade Ubuntu (LTS, I forget which version) years ago, but it failed hard. I still don’t know why. It wasn’t something I could figure out in half an hour, and it wasn’t worth investing more time than that.

      Come to think of it, it’s possible all my upgrade woes came down to Nvidia drivers. It was a common problem on Suse (TW), to the point where I pinned my kernel version to avoid the frequent headaches. I’ll try a rolling distro again when I switch to AMD, maybe.

    • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
      10·
      6 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.

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    36·
    6 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.

  • Zucca@sopuli.xyz
    19·
    6 months ago

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

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 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.

      • Zucca@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        6 months ago

        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.

  • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
    14·
    6 months ago

    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 install don’t use Ubuntu anymore.

  • ik5pvx@lemmy.world
    10·
    6 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.

  • pop@lemmy.ml
    9·
    6 months ago

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

    need moar bugs fixed, just to be safe

    • D_Air1@lemmy.ml
      5·
      6 months ago

      I feel like that may be true nowadays, but I remember back when I used to use ubuntu that the upgrade from 16.04 to 18.04 was pretty bad. Fedora has always worked great for me, but these days I only use rolling release distros in which case there aren’t any major version updates in the first place, so the problem largely doesn’t exist in the same context.

  • ares35@kbin.social
    8·
    6 months ago

    upgrades have been working fine here, both linux and windows, for well over a decade.

    only if a system is also being repurposed at the time of the ‘upgrade’, or if i’m changing the connection type of the boot drive (such as from sata to nvme, or switching an older system to ahci mode) do i install ‘from scratch’.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    5·
    6 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.

      • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
        3·
        6 months ago

        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.

  • yala@discuss.online
    5·
    6 months ago

    I always upgrade as I can’t deal with a clean install every so often. This warrants using a distro that does handle this well, though*. Which, thankfully, isn’t a big deal as most distros support this anyways.