Safe to upgrade in-place?

[chemicalfan]

I appreciate I might get flamed for this.

Is it safe to upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 through Synaptic? It is a no-no under Windows to do this, as performance and reliability just go down the pan. I'm fairly new to Ubuntu, in that I haven't seen a version upgrade through before, so wanted to confirm that an in-place upgrade through Synaptic was ok, and that a complete format and fresh install isn't necessary as under Windows.

[squaregoldfish]

I've been upgrading from 7.10 right through to 9.04 via Synaptic, and performed similar upgrades on several machines. I've never seen any Windows-style issues from doing this.

Steve.

[chemicalfan]

Excellent, thanks a lot man!!

Side question: What is the point on an LTS release then? If upgrading is minimal hassle, surely it's what everyone would do? Except maybe corporate servers - may want to do their own testing and that, but I'd imagine that they'd be happy with the performance improvements a new version would bring, so would pull their fingers out!

[squaregoldfish]

I suppose that not every corporate wants the hassle and risk* every six months. Having a stable operating system that's supported for 18 months is a much better option in a lot of cases.

* Yes, there's a risk in every upgrade that things might go wrong, and the potential downtime in fixing problems isn't always worth it. Note that your original question only mentioned performance problems ;)

Steve.