Is upgrading equivalent to fresh install?

Is upgrading equivalent to fresh install function wise?
Not sure how to put this. Since I only modify the system configs minimally and keeps track of my customization, ideally I prefer to get an identical experience in an upgrade compared to fresh install.
However I’m worried that the upgrade may gimp the improvements by keeping the old config files or not installing new packages (GNOME 45 core app changes) etc. If so, is there some way to notify me of such during the upgrade so that I can manually take care of them?
Also does the answer also apply to beta (F39 beta)?

Seems not. List of things to check: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/upgrading-fedora-offline/#sect-optional-post-upgrade-tasks

Edit:
Upgraded. The interface is the same as what would appear using GNOME-Software upgrade, doesn’t show console output unlike dnf upgrade. Looking for a way to see the upgrade log.

Edit2:
dnf system-upgrade log --number=-1 (ref) shows the log, contains all the warnings as expected from dnf, though warnings are not colored for some reason.

Edit3:
Upgrade seems pretty smooth. No errors & warnings relevant to me, or understandable by me :laughing:. Turns out the log is just journald log.
journalctl -b -1 -g "warn"

Edit4:
In terms of GNOME 45 app changes, Loupe is automatically installed with EoG not uninstalled. Snapshot doesn’t seem to exist in Fedora package repo though.

Fresh install sets things up as included on the install media. Only the software versions on that media are installed and only basic configs.

An upgrade (for the most part) leaves all configs as they were at the time of the upgrade. User configs in the users home directory as well as in /etc (and some other locations) are not changed when an upgrade is done. This remains true whether it is an upgrade of the same release version of fedora or if it is an upgrade to a newer release version.

Sometimes when there is a major release number change and the app uses different configs this may result in unanticipated performance – sometimes better and sometimes worse. Mostly though, unless a major config change has occurred the user sees little difference.

Different threads on this forum have revealed such surprises at times.
If you see problems after an upgrade the test of whether it is a config issue seems to be creating a new user and see if the new user has the same results. If different it is usually in the users home directory config files for that app.

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