Upgrade, or not? That is the question...

**bomanizer** · May 25th, 2008

Hi ya all. Have you ever decided not to upgrade to the new release? I'm asking this because I see no compelling reason to update to 8.04. What happens to me once Gutsy reaches the end of the support period? Should I leave the OS as-is and update the apps once I see fit? It was quite a hassle to make my OS just the way I like it (custom kernel with thinkpad tweaks, oh yeah...) and I don't want to mess it up with a dist-upgrade. Also, I've gotten lazy and I don't want to install fresh and do the customizing all over again.

**Pumalite** · May 25th, 2008

If I have an OS that works and I like; I keep it.

**DJ_Peng** · May 25th, 2008

You may not be able to upgrade the apps too far unless you manually installed them. Most of the upgrades won't reach the repos unless someone backports them. But your customizations should stick after an upgrade. I've done upgrades from Feisty to both Gutsy and Hardy and didn't lose a single one of my settings (other than some sound settings when Hardy changed the default folder but that was no big deal to fix). You rarely need to wipe and do a fresh install to upgrade. The dist-upgrade handles it all for you, plus that way you do get the newer versions of things that got upgraded in the OS update.

**mikewhatever** · May 25th, 2008

Looks like you're stuck with Gutsy forever.

**bomanizer** · May 25th, 2008

Originally Posted by mikewhatever

Looks like you're stuck with Gutsy forever.

Don't mind if I do

Now that I recall, compiling a thinkpad-specific kernel isn't that hard... and that was just for the hdaps-thingy, parking the drive head. Anyways, I might do a complete backup of my system (excluding media files, of course

) and then dist-upgrade. Who knows, the new version might have the thinkpad/laptop stuff incorporated out of the box even better than previous releases.

I'm just curios, has anyone used a ubuntu system beyond the official support period?