When should I upgrade

[Liam Proven]

On 16 May 2011 21:00, stan <stanb at panix.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 01:01:43PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
>> On 1 May 2011 21:03, Soare Catalin <lolinux.soare at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi everyone,
>> >
>> > I would like to ask for a recommendation on this subject.
>> >
>> > I have performed an upgrade on my laptop from 10.10 to 11.4 a few weeks ago,
>> > and, to be honest I did not like it at all. Unity lacked the customization I
>> > got used to ever since I started using Linux, and it still seems to still
>> > lack them (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
>> > Thing is that I removed it and done a fresh install of 10.10.
>> >
>> > So my question is:
>> > (I didn't know that LTS has a 2 years cicle so) for how long can I stay with
>> > 10.10?
>> > Or what would the alternatives be in this case? (I wouldn't upgrade too
>> > soon...)
>>
>> Please bottom-post.
>>
>> LTS releases "live" for 3y on the desktop and 5y on the server.
>>
>> Ordinary releases "live" 18mth.
>>
>> 10.10 reaches end-of-life with 12.04, the next LTS release.
>> 10.04, on the other hand, will live until 2013.
>>
>> My recommendation is either to upgrade to each release, but leave it a
>> month or so for the early-adopters to find the bugs, or to stay on
>> LTS.
>>
>> I always get impatient with LTS releases - after a year or so, I want
>> the new features and the new toys. So I upgrade and every 2 or 3
>> upgrades I wipe and reformat.
>
> Why the wipe and reformat at all?

I generally used to find that after about 2 or 3 upgrades, an install
would be quite broken. Icons or whole apps that don't work, missing
buttons or controls, broken themes, broken boot sequences or
bootloaders, etc.

But it does seem to be getting better.

On this box, I did a clean install of 9.10. That -> 10.04 was totally smooth.

10.04 -> 10.10 had serious problems and reported a failed upgrade &
broken system, but actually, it was fine & I just had to remove &
reinstall a few packages to be fine.

10.10 -> 11.04 went smoothly with one major exception: no new
bootloader. My unchanged 10.10 GRUB was left in place, with the old
10.10 kernels, which now didn't work. I had to use Windows to fix it -
whatever the upgrade had done to my partitions and filesystems,
neither 32-bit nor 64-bit  liveCDs would boot. A full fsck of all
drives got them booting, then I could chroot to the HD install, remove
and reinstall GRUB and I was good to go.

So, I was surprised it worked & that I could rescue it this time, but
next time, I am suspecting it won't.

On my laptop, I generally keep two / partitions and alternate between
them, doing a clean install every time. I decided to risk it with
Natty.

There were lots of errors and I had to manually choose which versions
of about a dozen config files to keep, but in the end, it's worked
just fine. Unity 3D doesn't work, but I expected that - the 9.10 and
10.04 NBR didn't work either, and nor did netbook Unity.

However, once I manually installed Unity 2D, it's been fine.

It's bigger and a bit slower than before, though. A clean install
would probably have been worth it. I use the notebook less intensely
and so its install has far fewer customisations.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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