On Sunday 24 March 2002 17:34, Tim Holmes wrote: > But now I have a question. Why did you upgrade to 8.2? If 8.1 was > working, and you weren't having any problems, why did you upgrade > to 8.2? > > It seems a lot of people think that as soon a new revision comes > out, they have to upgrade to the new rev. That's not the case. In > previous revs that was needed. There was a good sized jump in > kernel capabilities and hardware additions from 7.2 to 8.0. So > there was a need to upgrade there. But from 8.1, to 8.2, I don't > believe there is. > > I've noticed, more so this time then with the last two Mandrake > revs, that people are upgrading merely because there's a new > version. Micro$HAFT has conditioned people to think that a new > version is out, and you have to upgrade. This is not the case with > Linux. > > If you keep your apps and patches up to date, there's no need to > upgrade. There are still people on the list that run on Mandrake > 7.2. In my opinion it's still the most stable of Mandrake's > releases. If you upgrade the kernel and apply safty patches and > the like, there's still no need to upgrade. At the time I only > went to 8.0 because of better hardware support.
Point taken (and I agree that 7.2 was a damn fine distro). Of course, if you take the trouble to upgrade your apps (and the necessary libraries) and choose the best kernel for them (not always the latest!) then you have no pressing reason to upgrade. OTOH, once you do that, you are in effect creating your own Linux system anyway. I usually upgrade my most-used apps to the point that I start getting serious conflicts, then upgrade the whole distro. It's just easier that way. I'd rather spend an hour upgrading my whole system than spend weeks tinkering with it. As for the analogy with Microsoft upgrades, I think if there's one thing MS taught me, it was _not_ to upgrade! Apart from my Linux box, the machines in my office run MS Office 97 on Win 98SE, except for one which is still on Win95 (in fact the upgrades to 98SE weren't my idea - they came when we had a hardware upgrade). Robin
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