[ldev]

Because you can upgrade from windows 3.11 all the way to 10, good luck with ubuntu.

Yeah, I see your point.

[rawfan]

I have actual machines that I was able to flawlessly upgrade from 4.10 to 17.04. Can't say that about Windows. Though I did actually know what I shouldn't mess with if I want the upgrade to go through (or fix before).

[osd]

You got extremely lucky. Not that windows is much better, but in general there are hiccups to upgrading with most linux distros as well as windows.

[regularfry]

I hit problems with the desktop environment on both 8->10 and 10->12, then gave up trying to upgrade Ubuntu in-place. Debian has been absolutely fine, though.

[masklinn]

> Because you can upgrade from windows 3.11 all the way to 10

That has never ever worked for me until the 7 -> 10 upgrade: 95 -> 98, 98 -> 2k, 2k -> XP and XP -> 7 all failed miserably and required installing from scratch.

And even 7 -> 10 failed without any helpful information= the first few times I tried it (unlike OSX where I've been upgrading and migrating the same system for more than 10 years across multiple machines and versions).

[Longhanks]

This is more like 7 -> 10 (14.04 is LTS predecessor to 16.04). Totally valid upgrade path.

[JdeBP]

There are people who have done it all of the way from Windows 1.