What's your record for # of dist-upgrades to new versions?

[vayu]

Sometimes people say it's best to do a fresh install to a new release. With my time constraints that's inconvenient. I'm wondering how successful (or unsuccessful) people are at using dist-upgrade over and over.

I'll start.

1) Hoary -> Breezy -> Dapper
2) Intrepid -> Jaunty -> Karmic

Started with Hoary on two machines, dist-upgraded to Breezy then to Dapper (on both) where I stayed for a few years until Jaunty was out.

I couldn't get Jaunty to download for some reason so I downloaded Intrepid, did my first fresh install in years and immediately dist-upgraded to Jaunty and then to Karmic when it came out.

The Hoary to Dapper worked for years on both machines.
The Intrepid to Karmic on one machine is the very best OS I've ever had in all respects. On the other machine it was great in many respects but was unusable because of the random lockups. Which is about the machine not the dist-upgrade, because I can't get fresh installs of neither Jaunty nor Karmic to work on it :(

[docus]

I haven't tried a dist-upgrade yet - I've always done a fresh install, partly because after 6 months I've messed around with my system so much that I needed a fresh install anyway... But I'll try out dist-upgrade for 10.04. Sounds like you've had good results. Looking forward to hearing other views on this.

[NoaHall]

dist-upgrade != update of version of distro.

[marin123]

hardy->intrepid->jaunty->karmic

at the end i had to do a fresh install because nothing worked properly (or maybe it was because karmic wasnt finished when it was released)..
i'll do an upgrade with lucid and hope everything will work fine :)

[TheNessus]

j->k

[Nevon]

I've never done an upgrade. I've heard too many horror stories to even bother with it.

[mgmiller]

You can look at my sig for the answer to the question. I learned a lot in the process. The only reason I started fresh with 9.10 was for the 64 bit, ext4 and grub 2 stuff. I still have the old drive that has been dist upgraded from 5.04 to 9.10 and it works fine. What I found over the years has been to stick to the repos as much as possible, especially for the video drivers and then the upgrades go pretty smoothly. I generally did the upgrades when the release candidate came out. I have my friends and relatives running Ubuntu wait about 1 1/2 months after the release date to upgrade. That way most of the bugs are worked out.

[FuturePilot]

Gutsy → Hardy → Intrepid → Jaunty

Did a fresh install of Karmic because I wanted the full benefits of Ext4.

I've never had a problem that was caused by upgrading.