On 27 September 2014 19:52, James Freer jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com wrote:
In place upgrades is something I've not done as... from what I've read it's not recommended.
I don't see any fundamental reason why an in place upgrade should cause any more problems than any apt-get upgrade except that more things get upgraded in one go. And I've never had any problems that weren't related to the new distro itself (eg that it no longer supported my old video hardware), ie they'd have hit me regardless of whether I upgraded or went for a fresh install. A quick spin up from a LiveCD before the upgrade is a good idea for that reason (although I'm normally too lazy to bother). My attitude is that as long as important stuff is backed up I should try the in-place upgrade, and if it breaks I wipe and do a clean install, which is where I would have started anyway otherwise.
So if you've had no few problems all I can say is you are lucky.
On the contrary, it is down to the robustness of apt package management, and the work that Ubuntu developers (in my case) put into making it work; it's not just luck that I've been doing in place upgrades since 5.x on various hardware and none of the problems have been more hassle than doing a fresh install. (That said if anyone else tries it and it fails it's not on me, ok?!?)
I've always installed from CD/DVD live; doing the gparted disk check first and then installing. Most of the posts on ubuntu forum and mailing list is because people haven't done an md5sum/sha256sum check on an iso burn or upgrade. The 12.04 to 14.04 seems to have lots of problems.
Which is of-course one step that you don't have when doing an in-place upgrade; no CD download, no issues burning the disk.
"But isn't it great to have a choice!" But the choice isn't so great.
Consider the alternatives though. Hate Windows 8.x? Tough. Like iPhones but don't want a huge one? Tough. Don't like Unity? Try Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, ...
Also, you expressed concern that Mint doesn't have many people behind it; but realistically how long would it be before it was forked in the event that development stopped.
I agree that none of them are perfect and sometimes you just wish that instead of competing efforts on different products we could have all that effort go into one, but the joy of FOSS is that you can generally pick the best bits of each and combine them - quite often right down to a a source code level. Since "best" is always going to be subjective there's always going to be choice.