The Register has their review of Fedora Linux 41 beta:
and the author makes an interesting claim:
Oddly, version-to-version upgrades are not such a routine thing in Red Hat land as they are for most other distros. We’ve heard from several Fedora users that they simply wipe and reinstall every year or so. “Normal” is just what you’re used to, after all.
I know this isn’t scientific, but I’m curious… as a Fedora user, what is your practice?
I generally…
reinstall every release (or two releases)
upgrade sometimes, reinstall others
install once, upgrade until the machine is replaced
install once, never upgrade, keep using it forever (yolo!)
I’m not a fan of “reviews” that test in Virtualbox. Install it on bare-metal and use it as a daily driver for a month and then do a review. I want the review to actually include stuff about compatibility and performance.
I heard a lot things from (Fedora) users over time, but that someone always reinstalls Fedora when they could upgrade is something I never heard.
That said, it occurred that I reinstalled Fedora in cases when I experienced that some older defaults/configs are no longer optimal (not before a Fedora was installed 2 or 3 years I think, if not later). But I think that occurred 2-4 times in the last about 15 years or so. I expect that related compromises apply to any distribution. Otherwise, I stick with “install once, upgrade until machine replaced”.
Yet, I wonder if updates are maybe less stable with third party software from rpmfusion or nvidia? I think to remember that I saw already reports of upgrade issues with a rpmfusion packages. People who use that might have incentives to prefer reinstall over upgrade to avoid issues? That’s just a guess of course.
I actually stuck with upgrades far beyond “until the machine is replaced”. I would move the HDD to a new machine instead of reinstalling. On occasion, I’d cp -a ... the whole root filesystem to a new HDD (or SSD when those came along). Also, I’ve been using mirrored system drives on my workstation for the last 10 years or so to lessen the worry about losing anything if one of my system drives fail. Until a few months ago, I had a install that I’d been updating for over 15 years. I did finally bite the bullet and do a full reinstall. But even then I did it in an unusual way (I used dnf --installroot ... to install a new OS on a new ZFS filesystem (same filesystem pool) so I could switch back to the old one if I realized that I needed something that I couldn’t get set up on the new install right away (for a while, I could switch between the new and old installs just by adjusting the kernel root=... parameter)).
I reinstall; heard too many horror-stories of OS upgrades and experienced some myself trying a few times with Vista Gives me a good opportunity to update configs too with a fresh-install!
I used Fedora since the 20s and never release-upgraded it (all clean reinstalls). I think the only Linux distro I upgraded was Ubuntu between 6 to 7.
I choose to reinstall. I like to keep my computer close to what upstream intends. My worry with upgrading is that after upgrade(s), my install drifts from what is intended. For example, openSUSE Tumbleweed is moving to SELinux by default but older installs are staying on AppArmor; also there was a regression with networking on old installs since the networking on them was set up differently than more recent installs.
Atomic distros like Silverblue mitigate most issues, but isn’t perfect. Silverblue can’t upgrade grub (you can in 41 but it’s not an automatic process) and there’s still a lot of state information in your home folder.
The only time I install is to put on a new system, I generally upgrade in-place. My old work desktop started with Fedora 21 and was continuously upgraded until the system died due to power surges destroying it before I could upgrade it to Fedora 33.
I did choose the re-install answer because that is what I have always done, but now that I am using Kinoite I will try the upgrade possibility. See how that goes, if it goes wrong I can always do a re-install.
I upgrade and fix the packages for 2/3 versions, and reinstall when I get the time to. I feel more and more sus about my system over upgrades, the problems are:
I’m not sure if upgrade is equivalent to fresh install config-wise and package-wise, even after manually overwriting .rpmnews and checking the Fedora package groups.
dnf system-upgrade often resolves dependencies badly. Had quite some grief with it (and GNOME Software) in the past [1][2]. And manually changing their marks feels hacky, especially changing to group marks [3].
The Workstation Live image is also kinda sus [4], so I always install from Everything installer and pick the Workstation environment group instead.
i usually start with upgrade and see how it goes then freshinstall if there is things i cant figure out. Fedora rolling release would be really nice tho no more upgrades to new release just rolling and it would be still stable
There are some real downsides to rolling releases though when big changes occur. I was using Arch during the time systemd was introduced and during a few major glibc changes, and it caused mayhem in the community with thousands of broken systems, since many low-level libraries relied on each other and needed to be upgraded in just the right order.
I think in a weird way I’m almost lucky that I don’t have a machine anywhere near powerful enough to run a VM. If I want to jump distros, I have to properly back up my files and reinstall on my main computer. Feels like it gives me more of a chance to enjoy it for a week or two.
Gives me a good opportunity to update configs too with a fresh-install!
