General Discussions

Exactly right and these people are 90% of the users, some of them are truly noobs and some fiddle with programes from "questionable sources" that compromise their OS and they dont have much choice.

[Edited by Vlad_the_Bad, 2/1/2015 11:02:11 PM]

I won't do upgrades for a couple of reasons:

1. The upgrade takes forever. I can do a fresh reinstall off an image in ~5 minutes over the network. My "tweaks" are part of the image. Baseline applications (including Steam) are, too. Making an image, and restoring from it, is dirt simple; so much so that a particularly retarded monkey could figure it out.

2. I am not running the same machine that I had when Vista came out. Or 7. Or even 8.

The only upgrade that I trust is installed via the following command:

yum -y install dist-upgrade

Neo7. I used to upgrade over older OS'es in the past. Until I started reading that it is best to do a clean install. So you are stating it is better to just upgrade over the old system, then run the disk cleanup to delete to Windows.old folder? Aside from the supposed storage loss, I always did the clean installs to avoid any issues or conflicts. Can anyone weigh in on this?

Basically and theoretically Neo is right and there shouldnt be any issues for those who keep their os intact but in reality like I mentioned earlier few people do and therefor a fresh install is recommended for the majority of users.
I myself reinstall Win7 every 6-12 months because all of the endless crap I install on my pc..

It's based on your preference. You can do either way. I do have backups including image backups but I have rarely ever had to ever use them (and they are in a sense purely a backup to me to be used in dire situations). The main issue is getting things up to speed. Whatever gets you there is what you should use. If you take good care of your OS, an in-place upgrade should be painless.

I have never had any time issues with in place upgrades. Rarely do client Windows machines exceed 10 minutes for me. Only server upgrades take a relatively long time and it is due to what I manage on it (requires prep work). It would take significantly longer for me to rebuild the server from scratch. The notion of "takes forever" sounds like an exaggeration based on my experience with it. Yum, Apt-get, zypper, whatever managers technically suffer the same pitfalls that can happen and even the documentation behind each distro often advises against using them and instead doing a backup and restoration after doing a clean install. My machine is well primed for my tastes, I have no plans for hardware upgrades anytime soon.

Lately, Windows 10 has been smart and doing upgrades on its own during the night time after I go to sleep. That way I wake up and the system is already primed and ready to go.

[Edited by Neo7, 1/31/2015 9:55:33 PM]

Neo,

"I have never had any time issues with in place upgrades. Rarely do client Windows machines exceed 10 minutes for me."

It's been my experience that your experience is incredibly atypical. Best case was 30 minutes but usually more around the 45 minute mark. If user data had to be ported over as well, 90 minutes at the earliest but we used to budget two hours. Thankfully we don't waste that time any longer.

"The notion of 'takes forever' sounds like an exaggeration..."

It's a bit of hyperbole, admittedly. However, "takes forever" is my expression for anything that takes longer than installing from an image over the network. Compared to the time mentioned above versus ~5 minutes, that qualifies as "forever" in my book.

"Yum, Apt-get, zypper, whatever managers technically suffer the same pitfalls that can happen and even the documentation behind each distro often advises against using them and instead doing a backup and restoration after doing a clean install."

Because the Linux philosophy for the reasons for doing so is quite different than that of Windows. The documentation also states, explicitly or implied, that the recommendation exists to ensure maximum stability (which has a different degree of dependability than Windows' definition of stability). However, you're also not addressing rolling release distros that are specifically designed to be upgraded through major releases without issue. Arch, for example.

I heard the Tech Prewview. Logs everything you do and sends it back.