On Wed, 13 Apr 2022 20:22:16 -0700 Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> dijo:
>Questions for you folks with years of Ubuntu experience: > >1) How easy/fraught is a dist-upgrade, say 16.04 to 20.04? > >2) Should I wait for 22.04.1 (estimated 3+ months from >now) before playing with 22.04 Jammy? I left this thread alone for a while because I didn't want to get into the dist-upgrade vs. fresh install argument that it invites. I'll just say that the last time I did a fresh install it took eight days to get the system to about 80% usability for all my needs. At the same time I keep my systems up to date with the dist-update feature. (Dist-update /= dist-upgrade.) Once in a while there is a problem, but it's usually trivial. The dist-update feature is kind of a compromise between a rolling release distro and no changes until there is a new full release. Ubuntu does it by coming out with a stack of new stuff every month or so, including sometimes even new kernels. When I need to do a dist-upgrade (e.g., the impending need to upgrade my Xubuntu 20.04.something computers to 22.04), things get a bit more hairy. Before continuing I should state that Ubuntu will release 22.04 imminently as I write this (mid April, 2022), but only for fresh installs. Ubuntu's policy is not to make the dist-upgrade available until the first dot release. Usually that is a month or two later, but for 18.04 to 20.04 it was not available until nearly October. I should add that Ubuntu allows you to tell their Software Update app not to bother you with dist-upgrades until the next LTS version is available, or you can set it to announce it for every six-month upgrade. My preference is for LTS only, but some people prefer to do the dist-upgrade for each version, every six months for Ubuntu and Fedora. I should also mention that everyone's needs are different. Many still run releases that were released five and even ten years ago. I hate having to upgrade the system, but I find myself having to decide whether it is better to be gored from the front or from the back. If I don't upgrade, apps slowly lose features or fail to run at all, and worse, I can't install the latest version of an app. If I do upgrade then other apps suddenly won't work, but I gain things that I couldn't do before. Life is always six of one and half a dozen of another. My experience over more than a decade of Ubuntu dist-upgrades is that after a dist-upgrade there is always a day or two of patching stuff that breaks. Usually this actually results in a better outcome anyway; I just bitch at the time I have to spend putting my computer back together. I should add that, although occasionally I have had serious issues, I have never had a computer fail to boot after a dist-upgrade. I guess, to summarize, the closer your computer is to what you get with a fresh install, the fewer problems you will have with a dist-upgrade. The more you are like me - hundreds of strange apps and configurations - the more likely it is that you will feel pain. But then, you still save yourself the hassle of spending a week getting everything working like you need it to on a fresh install.
