I've had trouble updating to a new version in the past. Any advice?

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I have been running Fedora on my old IBuyPower tower PC with Intel I7 6600 for about 8 years now. I have tried to upgrade to each new release of Fedora Workstation fairly regularly from when the upgrade option became available until Fedora 39 came out, but the upgrades always failed for me. Thus I always had to do a clean install, but this was always a pain in the neck, big time. I would back up my home directory, in which all the data I wanted to keep from the previous release was stored, but copying that directory from the backup into a new release does not do much good, because once things like Thunderbird (email program) and Google browser are installed with the new release, all the files like address book, bookmarks, inbox, have already been set up by the new release and just copying the old files over the new ones makes a big mess, there is not any decent way to fix them. Google can dump some of them into a restorable backup, but it would never let me create a backup bigger than 262 megabytes (IIRC), and my files got bigger than that.

I see now that I can try to run the upgrade process to upgrade Fedora 39 to Fedora 41 and it is supposed to work. Is there much of a chance that this will actually work for me now?

One thing that may be working against me is that I may have installed some software from github, etc, to get specific versions, not using dnf, and some of these may also have different versions in the standard Fedora releases. Could that be causing the crashes during the upgrades?

Additional question is this. The I7 6600 machine getting old, I am going to replace the motherboard and memory with Ryzen R7 around the time of the upgrade, keeping all the same HDDs, SSDs, the same sound card, and the same graphics card. Should I replace the motherboard and memory before or after I do whatever it takes to upgrade Fedora?

Any hints about how to not spend 3 days beating myself to death over all this would be welcome. Thanks for any guidance.

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Before you upgrade your hardware, you might wish to explore VenToy. It will allow you to create a bootable USB SSD, store and directly boot ISOs and install Fedora.

Using Ventoy, you can boot a SystemRescue ISO and get access to gparted to carve partitions before you install Fedora 40 or 41.

If you have a recent version of a Google Chrome installed, close Chrome and then copy ~/.config/google-chrome to a external SSD. After you install Chrome on the upgraded system, replace ~/.config/google-chrome with the version from the SSD. Chrome will now be the same as it was when you made a copy of the configuration file.

If your ‘data’ partition is not huge you could use the dd command to copy its content to a target partition on an external SSD. That partition MUST be exactly the same size as the ‘data’ partition and ALL data that was on it will be overwritten.

Following is a link to a post about VenToy:

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Added backup, upgrades

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I just use the Fedora USB installer to install on a USB-SSD.
I first upgrade it to the new version of Fedora and test my systems
using it. You do need to make sure the the UEFI boot files are on the SSD.

This also works as my rescue system. And being writeable it will persist scripts I develop for rescue. For example scripts are mount all the partitions on servers.

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Thanks Ernest. I think that the last time I went through this I tried to create a bootable ISO USB stick, and that failed, too. So I am a little shy about trying that Ventoy trick, too. The only SSD I have now is my Windows 10 boot drive, which I want to leave as is, because of some important apps not available except on Windows that I have to run about once every couple of months. I don’t know if that will work whatever boot selection software comes with the new motherboard, but I can hope that it will. The UEFI thing, whatever that is, I don;t know much about. I always have to open the hardware setup screen to select my boot drive to get the machine to boot into Fedora, and it seems that sometimes, if I try to boot linux when Windows thinks it needs to do something, it mucks with something and takes over the machine during the boot for a while to install software, etc, etc. That might also be related to my troubles getting things to update, IDK. It seems like every time I had that upgrade fail over the years, I wound up buying one or two new hard drives to help me work my way out of the mess, so I’ve got lots of hard drives to shuffle around and make all my backups, etc.

Plan now is to make as many backups of everything as I can. Including a complete backup diskcopy of my linux system, which is on one disk. Then I set that copy aside so that it is safe while I try the upgrade.

I see that google is now supposed to let me save my all my bookmarks and history and cookies and all that on my google account, so I guess that I will try that. I also see that Thunderbird is now supposed to have some similar to save all of everything in a big compressed file, so I’ll try that.

Then I do the hardware upgrade first. If that works, I’ll try to upgrade the system from Fedora 39 to 41. If that upgrade works hooray. If not, I’ll have a CD installer of linux 41, and I’ll just install it on the disk that the upgrade mangled. If the google chrome and Thunderbird backup and restore work, about 90% of the troubles I’ve had before are gone.

There will be some differences between Fedora 39 and 41 because of crazy changes, but I can handle that a lot easier once I’ve got usb 3.2 installed to shuffle and backup my data wherever.

Thanks again, Ernest for getting me thinking about how to do this, and come up with a plausible plan.

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I have to wonder what exactly is causing the upgrade problems?
How are you trying to do the upgrades?

I have been using the dnf system-upgrade procedure for many years and have never encountered errors. I read relatively often on this forum of those using the gnome software process with problems.

The procedure shown here always works for me.