[Santa's little helper]

Whenever I read these forums there are always several people saying that they have upgraded to such and such latest verion of kernel , distribution , application etc. Me I don't see the point of upgrading. "If it works don't fix it". If I have a system which does what I want it to do and applications which behave how I want them to behave then it seems to me that upgrading only creates risks : new bugs or new features which I don't like plus it reduces the life of my hard drive installing the new stuff ! One obviously needs to be on top of security patches but apart from that why upgrade ?

Is there anyone else who feels the same ?

[netstrider]

I don't ever upgrade either. I would just add what I need as I go along from my distribution's repositories.

[cousinlucky]

The last time I had my hard drive reformatted I brought my computer home with its scaled down version of windows xp; and I re-installed my suse 10 os from the disks that I had bought a few years ago. I think if I went to a Novell mirror to download all of the upgrades that I have missed it would take much more than a day to finish.

I use suse 10 to safely access the Internet and nothing else. I'm very happy!!

I know I am missing out on a great deal of the things that Linux can possibly do; but I can not miss something that I know nothing about. Plus when I run the " repair program " it zips along in no time because the system is minimal.

[SagaciousKJB]

It just depends, I took the risk once to do a full version upgrade, and it worked out quite pleasantly on my server. However, when I tried the same on my desktop--slightly newer hardware, slightly more media-oriented--it didn't work out well.

It's funny though, because, I spend most of the time and effort in configuration on my server, but I'm more trusting of the upgrade process for a simple terminal/server environment than I am for one on a desktop machine, given that I'm using relatively new software, and the support for drivers and modules on *buntu is a bit fickle. Even though a lot of time and effort was put into configuring the server the way it is, I have backups of all that; what's harder to backup is the capability of the OS to utilize your hardware. From the last system upgrade on my desktop from 7.10 to 8.04, the modules and binary drivers for my nvidia hardware sketched out. In terms of video, the restricted modules in the repositories wouldn't work, and as far as my nvidia sound card goes, not even compiling from source solved it.

Given the chance, I would revert back to 7.04, because I really wanted to preserve the way I used the system on my desktop. I use two xscreens, and two video cards, and I've gotten very use to that. If I were to upgrade, and I could not get my two xscreen setup to work, I would be forced to clean install.

I think that I'm probably going to do that to revert back to 7.04 anyway.


As far as software updates go, I typically always do those.

[ls354]

I love pain in the ass problems that's why I upgrade but only on the desktop, my server runs the long term support version. Fixing a bug in less than eight hours gets you a lot of thanks on the new versions.

[bigtomrodney]

I like to get the new features. In the rapid turnaround of the open source world six months make a huge difference so for me it's all of the extra functionality that entices me to follow releases closely.

[Freston]

I thought I was sorta cured from my distrohopperitus.But alas, it was only temporarily.


I must say, I have had very good experiences with clean installs of new versions. From Slackware 11 to Slackware 12 was a good step. I've heard very good things about Slackware 12.1.

And The step I took for my workhorse, from Vector 5.8 to Vector 5.9 was also a good step, although V5.8 had SW11 as base and V5.9 has SW12 as base. No real surprises there.

I've never compiled my own kernel though. Never had the need for it.

[cayalee]

lol, i'm the same. my ubuntu 6.10 runs very well at the moment so i've no plans to do anything until that changes.

[Dapper Dan]

It depends on what I'm running.

At home, I run the very latest CRUX (2.4) with kernel 2.6.25.4 (the latest stable) and keep all packages updated. Having said that, I also run straight Windows Home XP at times on two boxes with no "service packs" updates and both run satisfactorily, plus Windows 2000 Pro with no service pack updates on one machine. Kubuntu is one behind, Fedora is Core 7, CentOS is 2.4, Slackware is 12 on one box and 10.2 on another (2.4 kernel mind you), And an Asus EEE PC without any updates.

Just as a note... on my three Windows machines, I've never run McAffee or Norton and have never inherited a virus, worm or Trojan. I use ClamWin, plus Firefox and regularly run Ad Aware and SpyBot to keep the flies away.

[geniuz]

For some reason updates have always given me bad luck, here I am having a perfect system set up after hours of customization and a single line of code in some update messes it all up...that's why I decided never to use dist-upgrade command again.

Actually I don't even have the need to, I never spend more than 3 months on the same install of debian, I like to keep my system very clean...that's why I reinstall debian every once in a while, just backing up all my config files ofcourse, not to do all the customizing again...