Upgrade Question

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 09:58:38AM -0800, MR ZenWiz wrote:
> I've had too many problems when upgrading between releases to do it at
> all.  I recommend doing a fresh install.

I've been upgrading Debian systems in-place since 1999, and I've
upgraded my current Ubuntu laptop continuously since I got it in 2013.
I'd be very much less happy with Ubuntu if I had to go through the
ordeal of reinstalling all the time. :-)

I do run into the odd minor problem, but it's generally easy enough to
sort out.  It would be worse to have to try to rediscover all the extra
packages I might have decided I needed to install every couple of years;
just long enough that I'll have forgotten the details.

(Obviously, this is for systems I pay a lot of direct attention to, like
my laptop.  Containers and virtual machines and other systems that run
special-purpose services I'm responsible for are a different matter.)

> I have my system booting from an SSD, and I have two of them.  When a
> new LTS release comes out, I swap the SSDs and do a fresh install of
> the new system on the swapped-in drive.
> 
> My home (and other non-system directories) are all on different drives
> from the boot drive.

Beware that sharing a home directory between OS installations of
substantially different vintage is not something that Ubuntu developers
generally test at all.  I would not be at all surprised to run into a
variety of exciting bugs if you were to try switching back to the older
"backup" installation in such a scenario (e.g. various applications
might well have upgraded to newer versions of databases that live in
your home directory, and older versions might not deal with that well).

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]