10.4 upgrade vs install

[Nils Kassube]

cherryfinals wrote:
> I've been noticing a lot of complaints both on this list and several
> others on upgrading from 9.10 to 10.4. Over the last couple of
> years, I have learned a dear lesson. The lesson is that you should
> have all your personal data and various configs on a secondary
> drive. When a new system is released, never, ever use the update
> function. Over the last five years I've been using Kubuntu, I have
> yet to see an update work perfectly, first time. During this time,
> I've installed and updated more than two dozen systems at home and
> at my office.

Well, that may be your lesson and I can feel your pain. My experience is 
quite the opposite to yours. I have used the upgrade option since about 
7.04 and I have used it on many (10 to 15) machines with various 
hardware and varying amounts of installed packages. There were only a 
few cases of problems and the problems were no big issues (for me 
anyway). I never had to do a fresh install on those machines where the 
upgrade didn't work well.

Therefore I would always suggest to first backup the important data and 
then _try_ the upgrade. If it really fails, you still can do a fresh 
install, but usually that step isn't necessary. The advantage of an 
upgrade is that you don't have to make notes of the installed packages 
because they are also upgraded to the new version. Overall it saves a 
lot of time.

Furthermore there seem to be a lot of grub problems due to the new grub 
since 9.10. However that seems to only affect those with fresh installs 
which is another reason to try the upgrade first.


Nils