Although in the past the official policy of Red Hat was that you needed to do a fresh install going from EL N to N+1, that is starting to change. There is an internal team called "LEAP" whose job it is to make sure you can do that. I believe RHEL 7.8 to RHEL 8.1 was the first that you could officially do that. I don't know all the details. all I know is "we're working on it." I'm pretty sure that at the current time we aren't as smooth as Debian, they've been doing it much longer. But we're getting better, and for RHEL9, LEAP is being involved from the start. So maybe in a few releases / years people will be able to say our updates are as good, or even easier than debians.
On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 12:04 PM Dave Dykstra <d...@fnal.gov> wrote: > Yes, Ubuntu is based on Debian, and it can upgrade without full reinstalls > thanks mostly to its much more complete dependency tree. My home Debian > system has been upgraded many times over the past almost 20 years. The > only problem is that it is 32-bit, and upgrading from 32-bit to 64-bit > is much more challenging so I haven't been willing to take that jump. > There are web pages that show how to do it though. > > Dave > > On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 02:59:15PM -0700, Yasha Karant wrote: > > I need to upgrade my wife's machine from Ubuntu 18 LTS to 20 LTS at the > > earliest convenient time (that may be after the end of this academic > term to > > avoid disruption). She runs Ubuntu on her 2-in-1 as evidently SL 7 does > not > > support all of the hardware functionality that she needs. I have found a > > URL with detailed instructions that I am willing to forward the > information > > as a PDF to whomever has done this and is interested. My understanding > is > > that unlike EL that more or less requires a new install to go from EL N > to > > EL N++, Ubuntu will upgrade in place. If anyone has done this, please > > reply, preferably off list to ykar...@gmail.com so that any URLs will > not be > > "modified" by the security filters at my university. > >
