how does upgrade work for Ubuntu

[alain.roger]

Hi,

I'm from MS world so i'm sorry if my question looks like stupid, but how does upgrade work for ubuntu ?
i mean, let say i have ubuntu 10.10 and i would like to upgrade it to 12.10.

Usually in MS world it means to reinstall from scratch the whole damned system with applications and settings....which is painful.

is the apt-get upgrade or apt-get update do the work smoothly and everything is ok after that ?

thank a lot.

[oldfred]

It used to be you only could upgrade from LTS to LTS or just to next version.

But I just used liveUSB flash drive and upgraded from 10.10 to 12.04 on my laptop. It gave a new choice of upgrade from 10.10 and keep data and most programs which so far it seems to have done without any real issue. It reported one program did not upgrade but I have not found it yet.
Edit - just found it did not install wine.

Not sure if you can do that from command line or not.

Some have had issues when upgrading, so best to have backups and a liveDVD or flash drive anyway. If not used to Unity best to test live install also as that is a lot different.