Upgrade or Reinstall? That is the question

[utherpendragonfly]

When Jaunty Jackalope is released next month I'm not sure if I should upgrade Intrepid or do a clean install. I have the necessary backups on an external HD. Everything seems to be working fine right now (except quicktime movie trailers stopped working last week, not sure why?)
But I've read on these forums some people say it's best to do a new install, and others say an upgrade is all you need. I guess the benefit of a clean install would be I could choose ext 4 for the file system, but it sounds like that might not be a good idea just yet, because some people have had problems.
Any opinions would be appreciated.

[bhishan]

If you have everything backed up it is better to reinstall it with a cd, coz updating online will be really really slow for atleast the first three days because of too many users trying to update. Just download it from a torrent and reinstall it.

[Nostalos]

Guess the answer depends on how much your time means to you. I've had upgrades go really smoothly. I've had upgrades go really crappy. It really just depends on the quirks of the new version against how you have your system installed. Example. Intrepid upgraded flawlessly on my home PC. But harfed on my laptop due to it being encrypted with LUKS.

If you got the time to spare if the upgrade goes horribly. Go for it. If not, skip the wait and see step and just do the reinstall.

[utherpendragonfly]

Sound advice Thanks.

[Rohan Kapoor]

I too will be re-installing not upgrading once the official release is ready. I don't really want to run the beta on my laptop because it is used daily for essential tasks.

[fr0sty]

I would recommend doing a fresh install as then there will be less bloat on your system, and sometimes when the computer is upgraded from a current version, certain drivers may no longer function. (this happened with my desktop when i tried to upgrade to 8.10 from 8.04. Now i just chill with 8.04.)

This is my personal opinion, but i feel that by doing a clean install, Ubuntu will be able to recognized devices and find better drivers more efficiently than if upgraded.

[Rohan Kapoor]

I had similar problems with upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10. However, I just did a clean install of 8.10.

[utherpendragonfly]

I would recommend doing a fresh install as then there will be less bloat on your system, and sometimes when the computer is upgraded from a current version, certain drivers may no longer function. (this happened with my desktop when i tried to upgrade to 8.10 from 8.04. Now i just chill with 8.04.)

This is my personal opinion, but i feel that by doing a clean install, Ubuntu will be able to recognized devices and find better drivers more efficiently than if upgraded.

That's a good point. I had pretty good luck upgrading from Hardy to Intrepid, except for a sound problem that it took 2 days to discover was very simple to fix.
I think I'll do the fresh install.

[shane2peru]

I too do a clean install. I keep my /home on a separate partition and that seems to make installs go quick and easy. Sometimes it is necessary to go in a remove a bunch of .config files in the home directory to make everything run smooth, but it sure beats putting all those files back into my home directory. Although with an external hdd this is not that difficult of a process either. Just some thoughts. On the other hand I have had a bad experience of the .gnome file not being overwritten correctly that really messed the system up. So take your pick.

Shane