Comparisons

[sydbat]

A serious question. (Note to mods, this can be moved to Recurring or locked if it catches fire)

I was having a discussion with a couple of friends about upgrading OS's. I have not used Windows for almost 3 years, so I am not sure how accurate the following is.

Friend A wants to upgrade from Vista to 7 and had asked how long it would take. Friend B said 2 - 3 hours using the Windows 7 CD.

I recently (last week) upgraded from 9.10 to 10.04, and the whole process, including the download, took about an hour and a half. If I had decided to use a CD, it would have been 40 - 45 minutes.

Also, Friend B said that the Windows upgrade would completely remove applications if they were "not compatible". I did not experience this with my Ubuntu upgrade (AFAIK).

Without making this a Windows bashing session (if so, mods please lock this thread), I am wondering a couple of things...

If you have done both Windows AND Linux OS upgrades:

1) Does the above sound accurate?

2) If the above is accurate, why would Windows take 2 to 3 times longer to perform the upgrade?

3) Does Ubuntu (or any other distro) completely remove applications during an upgrade that it considers "incompatible"?

4) Extra credit question - how does OSX compare?

Again, no bashing, otherwise I will request this thread be closed.

Thank you for your participation.

[Bachstelze]

1) Given how long the Vista SP1 installation takes (well over an hour), I wouldn't be surprised it a Vista -> 7 upgrade indeed took 2-3 hours. I find the "it removes non-compatible apps" part hard to believe, though.

2) Beats me. I've always wondered about that too.

3) Yes and no. Remember that an upgrade from one Ubuntu release to another is essentially the same thing as a "normal" upgrade, the only difference is that you're upgrading more than a hundred packages all at once. Depending on your upgrade method, it may in theory remove packages that conflict with the newer version of another package. In practice, such cases are extremely rare.

4) OS X is very long to install too. I only upgraded it once, and didn't have any problems that I remember (so it probably wasn't too bad).

[sydbat]

1) Given how long the Vista SP1 installation takes (well over an hour), I wouldn't be surprised it a Vista -> 7 upgrade indeed took 2-3 hours. I find the "it removes non-compatible apps" part hard to believe, though.

Me too. That's why I asked. He was quite adamant about that. He did say that you have to physically be there through the entire upgrade to click "yes" to all the pop-ups that ask if you want to keep your current "programs" (one pop-up per application considered 'incompatible').

2) Beats me. I've always wondered about that too.

3) Yes and no. Remember that an upgrade from one Ubuntu release to another is essentially the same thing as a "normal" upgrade, the only difference is that you're upgrading more than a hundred packages all at once. Depending on your upgrade method, it may in theory remove packages that conflict with the newer version of another package. In practice, such cases are extremely rare.

I kinda thought that. I haven't found anything missing...so far...

4) OS X is very long to install too. I only upgraded it once, and didn't have any problems that I remember (so it probably wasn't too bad).

Thanks. I have a client that also has a Mac and they were wondering.

[conundrumx]

An OSX in place upgrade typically clocks in under 2 hours in my experience, varying from machine to machine. I believe the install disk has a very short list of incompatible applications which will be moved to a folder on the desktop if detected.

For what it's worth, I've had Ubuntu in place upgrades throw grave and dire warnings about unsupported packages before. The reason Linux distributions (or any OS using integrated package managing at the system level) are so easy to upgrade is because all the dependancies and conflicts are mapped out and known.

[YesWeCan]

Windows is a much bigger OS than Ubuntu, maybe 4 or 5 times as much install space. Windows is a big cow and comes with a lot more stuff both graphical, application and driver-related. Remember with Ubuntu you do your install and then you download extra apps. Also with ubuntu, many apps still work - the basic OS doesn't change that much each time so only a few things need to be replaced. Last week I upgraded XP to W7 Home Premium and it took me the best part of 6 hours by the time I had downloaded all the security updates and re-installed all my old apps and then installed their security updates and so on and so forth. W7 is very pretty and mostly user-friendly but bloated and slow compared to Ubuntu. Not bashing, just stating a fact.

[rjbl]

I tend not to upgrade in place. Usually when I reach the point that serious work is to be done to refresh the OS then 'tis fresh installation time.

This intuition is driven largely from my personal experiences trying to upgrade, in situ, Windows systems of the NT3/4 / Windows 2000 / XP era when in-situ upgrading was a real bugger and frequently failed leaving me with a box that had to be re-installed anyway. That was and is, for Windows boxes, always a PITA. Windows ain't very good at recognising your hardware, compared with most GNU/Linux distros since the RH7 era. Over the years Microsoft's generic device drivers always have tended to be a bit er .... generic and somehow, for me, the original hardware manufacturers driver disks/diskettes have gone MIA since the kit was bought. I budget for about a day to re-install XP, get the right drivers to make it work acceptably and to patch it up to SP3. Can't speak for Vista/Win7; never done it and don't expect ever to need so to do. 'Course rebuilding the system above the bare OS is a much more protracted affair. My surviving XP box is basically only an FSX machine and I can install, configure and test all the apps I use on it in about a day, maybe a day and a half.

I must say that the ease, speed and reliability of setting up a Ubuntu system from scratch has impressed me very, very deeply. I did three, for fun, in the course of evaluating Ubuntu as my personal system for the next ten years, on this box back in April. The basic OS installation of 10.04 from LiveCD is consistently fast and faultless. Well that was always so with any reputable GNU/Linux distro. Desktop configuration to meet my exact personal needs proved very fast and easy. Application configuration, similarly, proved quick and easy. I found that I could install and configure my personal system easily within a morning's work, say, three and a half hours. Ubuntu's Update Manager pushed out the necessary updates over the couple of days following each build exercise reliably and to the effect that I estimate that the bogey time for a Ubuntu complete system build is about three to five hours and the elapsed time from start to completion of fully-patched system building is likely to be about three to five days. Ubuntu's Update Manager system seems to work fine. No problems so far, and that includes a couple of kernel upgrades since May.

Not completely On Topic, I know, but my personal take-away message is probably that it ain't worth upgrading Ubuntu in situ. Back up yer data onto DVD and do a clean install when you want to upgrade to the next version of the OS.

ATB
rjbl