Fresh install?

[Derek Broughton]

Ric Moore wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 10:54 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> Bruce Marshall wrote:
>> 
>> > On Wednesday 15 October 2008, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> >> > 4) If the upgrade goes bad, you are left with nothing.
>> >>
>> >> How?  It's _never_ happened to me, and I've botched a lot of upgrades
>> >> in the last decade.
>> > 
>> > So software never breaks?  I admit that when it happened to me it was
>> > with SuSE long ago, but I'm not about to risk that again.
>> 
>> Of course software breaks, and I've had it break badly enough that it's
>> taken _days_ to get the system working again.  I haven't, however, ever
>> had an upgrade break badly enough that I'm "left with nothing".
> 
> OTOH, it consumes a lot of brain cells during that process that many are
> just not up to. 

I don't disagree.  I don't object to anybody choosing to do fresh installs
if that's what they prefer - and I've argued that I don't agree that it's a
Windows-style activity.  A fresh install in Linux is much more capable of
using parts of a previous install than Windows upgrades.  Still, I've never
had an upgrade actually leave me "with nothing".

> When I tried updating to FC5 from FC4 UDEV broke horribly 

Let's not compare apples to oranges.  An Ubuntu (or any Debian-based distro)
upgrade is nothing like a Fedora upgrade.

> Plus, I find a
> clean install to be quicker from DVD than eating up my satellite. 

If you've got a DVD, you can do an upgrade too, so that's not a valid
argument.  The DVD provides a local repository.
-- 
derek