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
    18·
    10 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
      2·
      10 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.

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    16·
    10 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
      3·
      10 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.

  • Zucca@sopuli.xyz
    14·
    10 months ago

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

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 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.

    • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      10 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.

  • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
    6·
    10 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.

  • pop@lemmy.ml
    5·
    10 months ago

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

    need moar bugs fixed, just to be safe

  • danielfgom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    10 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.

    • D_Air1@lemmy.ml
      1·
      10 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.

      • ryannathans@aussie.zone
        1·
        10 months ago

        Canonical makes ubuntu makes upgrades break on purpose so they can sell you ubuntu pro that has the fix in it. For example the upgrade you mention broke grub but only the paid support release ring/branch has a fix

  • exscape@kbin.social
    2·
    10 months ago

    I don’t think I’ve ever made a “clean upgrade” on Linux. I’ve done the opposite though, that is, bring an old install over to a new computer.

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
    2·
    10 months ago

    I upgrade when it’s a distro that releases new versions regularly (for example Fedora with two releases per year). I obviously also upgrade rolling distributions.

    Why? Because it’s less work and I haven’t had many problems with it.

    I usually clean install long-term distros like RHEL (or RHEL-based). These don’t always have a good upgrade path and I usually only use them on servers.