For Desktop personal use

[BarkingGhostar]

How often do you guys nuke and pave for a newer version of your favorite Linux distribution?

Admittedly, the whole concept of nuke and pave came from the Windows world where one expects catastrophic conditions to warrant such needs, but I thought I would ask and let my curiosity run a muck this morning.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Let's see, 10.04 in summer 2010, 12.04 summer 2012, 14.04 summer 2014...I'm probably going for 16.04 this summer as well.

Edit: And yeah, I do clean installs for all of them and then restore my home folder and grab my applications from repos.

 

[Ken g6]

I'm about to try my second one of these. My first was when my Ubuntu 9.04 install (which wouldn't upgrade properly) stopped responding to local KB/mouse. (But VNC worked until I could nuke-and-pave.)

 

[paperwastage]

think i'm 14.04 LTS + GNOME classic

will go for 16.04 LTS like Essence_of_war said, clean install....

tried upgrading before, something will always break (grub, graphics driver....)



looking to get a ESXi homelab to do more experimental testing. currently just using virtualbox to test-drive ubuntu 15.10

 

[Red Squirrel]

Only if I get new hardware, or if I feel like trying something new. ...Or if I accidentally installed the non LTS version and the repositories all die on me. #LFMF... I always double check that I'm actually installing the LTS version of a distro now.

 

[Jodell88]

Never. Rolling realease distros have their purpose.

 

[lxskllr]

Never. Rolling realease distros have their purpose.

This, and also I use lts releases on some machines. My main machine is debian testing that's run since Jan 2010. Other machines are Xubuntu, with the oldest from 2012.

 

[Jodell88]

This, and also I use lts releases on some machines. My main machine is debian testing that's run since Jan 2010. Other machines are Xubuntu, with the oldest from 2012.

I only use Arch Linux and my oldest install is from 2009.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Speaking of older distros, I have a Fedora Core 9 box still in production. The lost+found folder shows a date in 2008 so I'm guessing that's when I installed the distro, but not sure if that's the best way to check. Needless to say the repositories don't work anymore. They worked for quite a long time surprisingly though. I think it was just in the last few years that they were pulled.

I made a VM with CentOS to replace most of the stuff that box did such as DNS and local web based tools, but I still have to migrate mail, which is always a tedious task. I decided to go to a virtual user setup on new box as creating unix accounts for each email is kinda dirty, and there does not seem to be any system for per mailbox mail delivery rules as procmail only does unix accounts, so I have to code my own mail transport and just been lazy.

I'm looking forward to being able to fully retire that server since despite being an old machine, it has 8 gigs of ram and the CPU has VT-D, so it makes a nice sandbox for testing out a new VM solution. I just threw VMware on the new VM server because it was turn key but eventually want to move to KVM/Qemu once I can take the time to learn it.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Never. Rolling realease distros have their purpose.

I get this, but one of the things I noticed was even with rolling releases it doesn't necessarily mean the release activity will implement, say, the newest kernel. My current install, LTS 14.04, has had updates whenever they notify me to do so. But inspection of my system finds I am using kernel 3.13.0-24 even though there are has to be a couple of dozen kernels sitting on the box with the latest being 4.2.0-23.

I'm tempted to stick with the LTS-only aspects, but it seems strange that updates don't necessarily implement the latest and greatest you supposedly updated. But then again this could be my misunderstanding of how things work (my ignorance).

 

[lxskllr]

I get this, but one of the things I noticed was even with rolling releases it doesn't necessarily mean the release activity will implement, say, the newest kernel. My current install, LTS 14.04, has had updates whenever they notify me to do so. But inspection of my system finds I am using kernel 3.13.0-24 even though there are has to be a couple of dozen kernels sitting on the box with the latest being 4.2.0-23.

I'm tempted to stick with the LTS-only aspects, but it seems strange that updates don't necessarily implement the latest and greatest you supposedly updated. But then again this could be my misunderstanding of how things work (my ignorance).

LTS releases are bug fixes only, not new features. Your security is taken care of, but if you want the latest/greatest you'll have to go with a different(unsupported) kernel.

You having 4.x kernels on the machine is kind of confusing. They shouldn't download using the default repos. Do you have third party repos in your apt list? My Xubuntu(32bit) has the latest kernel offered @ 3.13.0-74

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I cannot say how I got them. The only app I installed was Virtualbox. They either got installed during the last installation of LM (~June 2014), or through some other mechanism I am not aware of.

 

[lxskllr]

Maybe Mint is doing something unusual. I've never seen that with the "official" *buntus.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Hmm, I could d/l the latest and install it into a VM and then have a look at the kernel options.

 

[manly]

Maybe Mint is doing something unusual. I've never seen that with the "official" *buntus.

Last I looked, Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS's kernel went from 3.13 originally to 3.19. I was surprised to see that. I don't know how a 4.x kernel would have landed on BarkingGhostar's system.

Apparently this is by design:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TrustyTahr/ReleaseNotes#LTS_Hardware_Enablement_Stack

 

[ultimatebob]

For something that I use for in the office for production purposes, I install the latest known stable (i.e. , nothing that ends in .0) version of CentOS and run it till it's no longer supported. By then, it's time to get a new PC.

For personal use at home? I use a Mac

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Well, I actually run a Hackintosh as well, but that is beside the point. I like to play with operating systems. I was just surprised that under software manager there were so many kernels available.

 

[KeithP]

I run Linux in a virtual machine so it is a simple matter of rolling it back to a previous snapshot. I can go back to the very beginning after the initial round of updates are applied or any of a few stages between that time and the present.

-KeithP