Good Idea for new users

[NoOp]

On 10/30/2009 07:34 AM, Avi Greenbury wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:11:40 -0700 (PDT)
> Leonard Chatagnier <lenc5570 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 
>> Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) it is not.
> 
> You are telling us (and, more importantly, people who haven't done it)
> that a system does not work as designed or advertised, and it is
> therefore advisable to avoid it.
> 
> That *is* fud. Certainly in the eyes of those people who have made good
> use of the system.
> 
> I have a desktop that's not had a fresh install since 6.10, a laptop
> that's derived from 7.04, a few PCs for which I've lost track and
> several servers running debian without rebuild for two to five years.
> In-place upgrades, as far as I'm concerned, are and should be the norm.
> I'm certainly not going to do a fresh install every six months.

FWIW, this machine (my primary work machine) has been upgraded from 6.06
(Dapper). So I agree that upgrades generally work just fine. Only issue
is that sometimes there is old cruft left over from some of the other
versions that may not get cleaned out properly. Then again, I install
just about everything under the proverbial sun on this box, so a lot of
the cruft is my own doing. :-)

That said, if you have a /home on another partition or drive, a fresh
install isn't a bad idea/suggestion either. Just be sure to catalog all
of your installed packages so that you can reinstall those as well.