Upgrade experience
 

I upgraded KUbuntu from 23.04 to 23.10 the other day on one of my workstations. 30 minutes later I was on 23.10. I could find no problems that I had to solve with the upgrade. Even the Nvidia driver (notorious for problems) continued to work fine. VMs just worked as well.

Also last week, I upgraded my dad's laptop from LTS 20.04 to 22.04 KUbuntu. Again once completed, the system had no problems that I could find or needed to solve.

Upgrades have come a long ways. I can still remember the times, an upgrade attempt usually meant a 're-install' or at very least a bunch of fixups.

That said, I always backup everything I want to save before upgrading. Not that trusting -- ever ;) .

Just passing along a 'good' experience :D . Hopefully, I am not the only one with good upgrade experience this time around.

With Linux Mint, I tend to have good experiences too!

it was already written somewhere, the update process itself depends on the initial system, if that is clean, maintained and there are no "strange" packages installed. The more you modify your system, the less likely you are to successfully upgrade.

Makes sense.

The most common problems I see with various Ubuntu systems involves ppa's, third party software. Commenting out the various ppa entries before upgrading often prevents problems. The other major scenario is trying to upgrade from or to an unsupported system. That in addition to what was posted in post 3.

Remember netbooks?

I had a Dell Netbook with Ubuntu, oh, a decade and a half ago. I think it came with v. 8.something. Every upgrade I did with it went quite smoothly.

Netbook? Ours was an HP Mini I believe with a light blue back. Still have one around here somewhere. Changing over from Windows to Linux Lite made a huge performance difference as I recall. Also changed out the hdd for an sdd which also helped. Need to pull that out again sometime :) .

I was on bleeding edge Fedora back then and upgrades were hit or miss on my work stations.

Back in 2009, all the Linux systems I had were servers, though I was starting to use Linux more for it. I hadn't yet gone to school, so I didn't even know how to properly use Windows server. I prefer Linux as a server, when it's possible, even if it serves windows clients. Anyway, I really didn't need to upgrade, because if something wasn't working, I would just do a scratch load.

That was also before I could just image a backup. with system rescue cd.

My point is: I never really needed much upgrading. However, with my main Linux Mint machine I have now, it seems to be almost daily so far that I do some sort of update or upgrade.

I should be more specific. I don't need much upgrading of hardware. I often upgrade or update versions of Linux Mint on machines, or apply some sort of software patch. My machines are lasting longer and longer. Eventually, yeah, of course the computer won't last forever. But when I get one that works for me, it works for a long, long time usually. Even in my Windows days, I was using XP for years on my laptop, before the need arose to do any sort of upgrading. Before that, it was close to my Windows 98 days, but you can't count most of that, because I wasn't on my own yet. I wasn't in control of purchasing a machine. I have been on my own since 2009, and it was 2014, when I needed a hardware upgrade, even with Windows. I needed it because of school. I used that older machine since 2006. Now it's a server for me, so I'm still using it. The machine was from the Vista days. The machine still works fine. I was dual booting a lot of those times too!