clean install: you make a backup, nuke the computer, install a fresh upgraded copy of the distro you want from a live usb, copy your data again to the computer.
upgrade: you wait ‘till the distro’ developers release an upgrade you can directly install from your soon to be old distro, you use a command like sudo do-release-upgrade
and why do you upgrade like that?
It depends. For Fedora I just do a in place upgrade. However once in a blue moon I do a reinstall.
Rolling with Gentoo here. Reinstall is not performed even when complete hardware upgrade has been done.
Wait for a bugfix release after a major release. Then upgrade.
need moar bugs fixed, just to be safe
rpm-ostree upgradeis enough on uBlue, as system release upgrades are automatically staged and just like normal updates.
rpm-ostree rebasemay be needed on Fedora AtomicUse a well versioned package manager guys.
Upgrade. It works perfectly fine and when it doesn’t figuring out what’s going on learns me something and several times has resulted in fix commits to the packages.
E: there’s some people saying they do clean installs on Ubuntu. They’re right that ubuntu breaks shit all the time but I’ve solved that by simply not using the bad distros.
Upgrading Ubuntu LTS since 2014. It’s always a good idea to read the release notes in order to know what’s changed. In general LTS-to-LTS upgrades have been trouble-free.
I follow the official upgrade method. Can’t be bothered to mess around with anything more complicated than that. Besides, the devs probably understand the system better than I do, so there has to be a reason why that is the preferred way.
Neither. I use a rolling release distro.
But if I have to use release based distros, I probably would clean install.
A rolling release distro is basically a requirement for me. I abhor major release upgrades. They’re usually labor intensive and often break things.
Xp to 7 was upgrade. 7 to 10 was clean
11 to Mint 21.2 was, obviously, clean
The few times i tried linux i used ubuntu. And each time a newer iteration was published a complete wipe and format was done for the new one
I almost always prefer clean installation when possible, while making sure to backup important content from highly accessed folders like Desktop, Downloads and Documents (on Windows), for example.
It just feels nice! Nice and fresh.