On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 14:48 +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
Ubuntu and Debian both *strive* to make *UPGRADES* work, why crap on that hard work with a reinstall?!
I second that.
This desktop started on Hoary and has been upgraded (usually before official release) at every stage through to Hardy. I have had exactly two problems that I wouldn't have encountered if I had done a fresh installation.
1/ At some point (I think it was the Dapper upgrade) my profile didn't inherit the new pixmaps for various icons..everything still worked but it all looked like it did before when logged in as myself. Easy to fix and not really a huge problem to start with.
2/ When upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy something horrible happened to compiz, I think I had some legacy stuff stuck in gconf but the outcome was that some of the plugins refused to retain their settings between reboots. I am pretty sure I could have fixed it but in the end I got bored and just moved everything to a new user profile. To be fair I think this was a result of installing various non packaged builds of various compiz bits before it officially worked on AMD64 and moving between XGL, AIGLX and the built in Nvidia render path whilst also going from Compiz--Beryl--Compiz-fusion. Normal people would not I suspect have encountered this problem.
The upshot is that in both cases there my problems stemmed from /home as they were user specific so had I done the reinstall but retain home trick I probably would have still encountered them (or worse)
As Brett points out Debian/Ubuntu put a fair amount of effort into making sure upgrades just work, this is even more true for Hardy as it also has to support upgrades direct from Dapper. You might actually get more breakage by effectively isolating all your user specific settings whilst upgrading (by keeping /home untouched) that you would do by letting the upgrade do it's thing.
I think the only time I would suggest a clean installation over an upgrade is when either you have lots of third party packages installed, you have installed lots of things from tarballs (which of course the package manager won't be aware of), or you know for other reasons that your system is a mess.