upgrade or clean installation?

[Jan Moren]

sön 2006-04-23 klockan 14:32 +0100 skrev Daniel Carrera:
> Ubuntuud wrote:
> > I always do a fresh install, I even reformat my seperate /home
> > partition. Keeps my PC clean... (I do transport my personal files to a
> > external HDD, but not my preferences)
> 
> Why? What do you mean by keeps the PC clean? Ubuntu doesn't naturally 
> degrade over time.

I do the same. It's just like moving house every five years or so -
you've accumulated a bunch of cruft, and cleaning out and starting over
means a lighter, simpler life (of course, you just start accumulating
again).

For apartments it's stuff; for computers it's applications and data.
After a couple of years with the same OS install, I must have hundreds
or packages (and dependencies) that I installed once to try out and then
never used, not cleaned up - indeed, I've mostly forgotten all about
them.

Same thing for data. Multiple megabytes of files that "might come in
handy someday", but of course never does. When I reinstall, I never just
copy files back; I only do so when I actually need them. And not
surprisingly, after six months, most of my data turns out to be neither
important nor in use - and so I delete it. This kind of cleaning will
not happen for me unless I do a reinstall.


-- 
Dr. Jan Morén (mr)              
Japan:  090-3622 8920           jan.moren at lucs.lu.se
Sweden: 031-360 7723            http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren