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One thing I really appreciate about Debian is that when a new stable release comes around, I can just upgrade and be reasonably sure nothing bad will happen. I

by krylon 3y ago

One thing I really appreciate about Debian is that when a new stable release comes around, I can just upgrade and be reasonably sure nothing bad will happen. It's not exciting, but a fair amount of the time, this is what people expect from their operating system. Support my hardware, give me the software I need, and stay out of my way otherwise. And that is what Debian does very well.

jacooper 3y ago
Its baffling that RHEL-based distros still don't support in place upgrades.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Strange; I would have assumed that `dnf system-upgrade` would have made it from Fedora to RHEL by now. Actually searching turns up https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/upgrading_from_rhel_7_to_rhel_8/index https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... , which... appears to use a totally different tool? I don't really know what's going on there, but it does looks like they have some sort of support for in-place upgrades now.
  - jacooper 3y ago
    Its was treated as "avoid of possible", but it loojs like that changed: > An in-place upgrade is the recommended and supported way to upgrade your system to the next major version of RHEL. As for RHEL-clones, your only choice is to use ELEvate(1), by almalinux, which supports other distros too. But overall the process isn't as simple as Debian/Ubuntu, and on clones other than alma, you need to resort to third party tools, with some clones like Rocky saying that in-place upgrades should be avoided. https://almalinux.org/elevate/ https://almalinux.org/elevate/
mikae1 3y ago
> One thing I really appreciate about Debian is that when a new stable release comes around, I can just upgrade and be reasonably sure nothing bad will happen. That's good feedback and I've heard it from other people. Personally I've never been able to dist-upgrade Rapbian or Ubuntu without breaking the OS.
- krylon 3y ago
  It's been a long time since I have used Ubuntu. In the ~2009-2013 era, my desktop ran Ubuntu, and I repeatedly upgraded it from 2008.04 -> 2010.04 -> 2012.04. There were a few issues, but nothing that made the system unusable. But that was over ten years ago, I have no idea how Ubuntu has evolved since. Raspbian has been problematic for me. I tried upgrading from Buster to Bullseye, and it went so badly I ended up reinstalling from scratch. (To be fair, the docs were clear that was a likely outcome.) OTOH, my ThinkPad x220 has been running Debian since 2016, I installed Jessie back then and upgraded as new stable versions were released. The upgrade to bookworm has finished by now, and it's been entirely unexciting. :-)
arcanemachiner 3y ago
I heard when Bullseye came out that I should wait a bit as the initial bugs were found. I'm wondering if that was true then or now.
- krylon 3y ago
  It depends. I use Debian on a few machines at home, if something were to break, it wouldn't be a huge deal. If I had dozens of desktops and/or servers to take care, I would probably take the time and upgrade a few non-critical machines to see how it goes, provided I have the resources for that. If in doubt, there's nothing wrong with waiting a month or so to see if others run into trouble. It's what I did when I worked as a Windows admin, and it saved me from major headaches more than once. (Admittedly, updates causing trouble is more common on Windows than on Linux in general and Debian specifically.)

by krylon 3y ago

jacooper 3y ago

Its baffling that RHEL-based distros still don't support in place upgrades.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Strange; I would have assumed that `dnf system-upgrade` would have made it from Fedora to RHEL by now. Actually searching turns up https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/upgrading_from_rhel_7_to_rhel_8/index https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... , which... appears to use a totally different tool? I don't really know what's going on there, but it does looks like they have some sort of support for in-place upgrades now.
- jacooper 3y ago
  Its was treated as "avoid of possible", but it loojs like that changed: > An in-place upgrade is the recommended and supported way to upgrade your system to the next major version of RHEL. As for RHEL-clones, your only choice is to use ELEvate(1), by almalinux, which supports other distros too. But overall the process isn't as simple as Debian/Ubuntu, and on clones other than alma, you need to resort to third party tools, with some clones like Rocky saying that in-place upgrades should be avoided. https://almalinux.org/elevate/ https://almalinux.org/elevate/

mikae1 3y ago

> One thing I really appreciate about Debian is that when a new stable release comes around, I can just upgrade and be reasonably sure nothing bad will happen. That's good feedback and I've heard it from other people. Personally I've never been able to dist-upgrade Rapbian or Ubuntu without breaking the OS.

krylon 3y ago
It's been a long time since I have used Ubuntu. In the ~2009-2013 era, my desktop ran Ubuntu, and I repeatedly upgraded it from 2008.04 -> 2010.04 -> 2012.04. There were a few issues, but nothing that made the system unusable. But that was over ten years ago, I have no idea how Ubuntu has evolved since. Raspbian has been problematic for me. I tried upgrading from Buster to Bullseye, and it went so badly I ended up reinstalling from scratch. (To be fair, the docs were clear that was a likely outcome.) OTOH, my ThinkPad x220 has been running Debian since 2016, I installed Jessie back then and upgraded as new stable versions were released. The upgrade to bookworm has finished by now, and it's been entirely unexciting. :-)

arcanemachiner 3y ago

I heard when Bullseye came out that I should wait a bit as the initial bugs were found. I'm wondering if that was true then or now.

krylon 3y ago
It depends. I use Debian on a few machines at home, if something were to break, it wouldn't be a huge deal. If I had dozens of desktops and/or servers to take care, I would probably take the time and upgrade a few non-critical machines to see how it goes, provided I have the resources for that. If in doubt, there's nothing wrong with waiting a month or so to see if others run into trouble. It's what I did when I worked as a Windows admin, and it saved me from major headaches more than once. (Admittedly, updates causing trouble is more common on Windows than on Linux in general and Debian specifically.)