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?

    • D_Air1@lemmy.ml
      0·
      5 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.

  • yala@discuss.online
    0·
    5 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.

  • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 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.

  • j4k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 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.

  • Peffse@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 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!

  • danielfgom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 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.

  • axb@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    I almost always prefer clean installation when possible, while making sure to backup important content from highly accessed folders like Desktop, Downloads and Documents (on Windows), for example.

  • shotgun_crab@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.

  • ik5pvx@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 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.

  • tsonfeir@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.