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by krylon 1111 days 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.
3 comments
arcanemachiner 1111 days 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.
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krylon 1108 days 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.)

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mikae1 1111 days 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.

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krylon 1111 days 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. :-)

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jacooper 1111 days ago
Its baffling that RHEL-based distros still don't support in place upgrades.
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yjftsjthsd-h 1111 days 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_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.

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jacooper 1110 days 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/

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