I almost always prefer clean installation when possible, while making sure to backup important content from highly accessed folders like Desktop, Downloads and Documents (on Windows), for example.

rpm-ostree upgrade

is enough on uBlue, as system release upgrades are automatically staged and just like normal updates.

rpm-ostree rebase may be needed on Fedora Atomic

Use a well versioned package manager guys.

It depends on the distro. Some of them have some shitty ass upgrade process and it breaks shit, and others are just awesome. I personally use a rolling release so I don’t have to worry about upgrades. I do get some issues here and there with some big upgrades, but nothing really major. I’ve only had to reinstall twice in the last 2.5 years.

upgrades have been working fine here, both linux and windows, for well over a decade.

only if a system is also being repurposed at the time of the ‘upgrade’, or if i’m changing the connection type of the boot drive (such as from sata to nvme, or switching an older system to ahci mode) do i install ‘from scratch’.

I upgrade when it’s a distro that releases new versions regularly (for example Fedora with two releases per year). I obviously also upgrade rolling distributions.

Why? Because it’s less work and I haven’t had many problems with it.

I usually clean install long-term distros like RHEL (or RHEL-based). These don’t always have a good upgrade path and I usually only use them on servers.

Upgrade. It works perfectly fine and when it doesn’t figuring out what’s going on learns me something and several times has resulted in fix commits to the packages.

E: there’s some people saying they do clean installs on Ubuntu. They’re right that ubuntu breaks shit all the time but I’ve solved that by simply not using the bad distros.

I don’t think I’ve ever made a “clean upgrade” on Linux. I’ve done the opposite though, that is, bring an old install over to a new computer.

Depends on the distro. On Debian I upgrade cause I know it works well. On Ubuntu I always had issues after an upgrade so I do a clean install don’t use Ubuntu anymore.

This is actually a question I’d like some opinions on!

I have a ton of headless servers running Debian that I just replace the sources.list for an upgrade. I imagine things are much more complicated when switches like X11 to Wayland happen, so all desktop environments get a wipe/install instead… But maybe I’m just making a lot of work for myself doing that!

I backup and then upgrade through the mechanism provided. Why? Lazy. I should take the time to set up a NAS and run most of /home from that, but never have been motivated enough to try it.

I usually let myself lag behind on Fedora to wait until the kinks have been worked out. I just jumped from 38 to 40 in an upgrade and totally regret it. Python is screwed up in distrobox and making problems, but I can roll back too.

I always clean install. I have my stuff backed up properly. I’ll go through and make a checklist of frequently used software so I can start off on the right foot. I like that new fresh smell of free space.

Wait for the distro to officially release an upgrade path. Only do a fresh install if it doesn’t work.

On Windows however whenever I would get a new pc in which I was prepping for staff(I worked in IT) the first thing I’d do after unboxing it is a wipe of the factory Windows install and do a clean install with the latest ISO from Microsoft.

No bloatware, network managers, anti virus etc nonsense. We had all of our own stuff for that which applied via Group Policy anyway.

I’ve got a desktop that got a dirty install of KDE Neon when the repositories first got put up (before there were isos). Been in-place upgrading it ever since.

Depends on the distro.

On my personal laptop with openSUSE, I have plenty confidence doing all kinds of upgrades and sidegrades (between Leap and Tumbleweed).
The package manager detects conflicts and makes me decide what to do with them. I’ve never seen the software or distro dependency definitions fuck up, it was always me making a wrong decision.
Well, and if I do make a wrong decision or anything else should go wrong during the upgrade, I can roll back to the BTRFS snapshot before.

On my work laptop, the best I can get is Kubuntu. Apt is much more fickle, since it doesn’t have as clear of a concept of what constitutes a conflict, but also what a correct system should look like.
The whole packages feel much more fickle, too, because they’ve got all these custom patches, so you really don’t want to accidentally mix different versions of packages, like might happen in an incomplete upgrade.
And of course, you get one chance at upgrading. If anything goes sideways, you better have your Live USB ready right away.

So, that’s why I would prefer to install fresh right away. Of course, my workplace doesn’t actually allow me to do that either. They really like to keep me on edge.

Clean install on a new computer. Then upgrades until the computer gets retired. Debian at home, Ubuntu server at work.

I like playing with distros and other OSes in VMs, if the thing doesn’t have a well defined upgrade procedure it gets ditched pretty soon.