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Comment by deeblering4 | Hacker News Reader

In my experience it's best to simply not attempt in-place major distro version upgrades and approach them instead as a backup/reimage/restore (or using an alternate/new machine)

This has been true for me across all distros, and honestly it's a main reason why I only run linux on servers anymore (easy to create a new VM for upgrades, harder to create a new laptop)

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I have been using linux and Ubuntu for years, and not once has a full upgrade gone off without a hitch. I did upgrade to 21.10 , and of course it blew away my display drivers.

Hmm, I have a couple of laptops with Ubuntu on them, they aren't my primary personal (or work) machines, but I generally haven't had trouble upgrading them - I did one today, via do-release-upgrade -d and it worked fine (though the FF snap, while maybe ok in theory, meant that it had lost all my tabs / bookmarks / etc., uninstalling and installing via apt got me the deb version which did pull those all in from my profile).

In my patchy and incomplete experience this is true for Ubuntu but untrue for Debian. As long as I've followed the upgrade instructions I don't think I've ever had a Debian stable version bump fail. Whereas Ubuntu... yeah, backup and restore, because you're going to do it anyway.

If you use btrfs, which Ubuntu defaults to, you can simply take a snapshot of your system before upgrading and roll it back if there's an issue.

That said, I use Ubuntu on many machines and VMs, and I haven't had issues with upgrading them at all.

I don't think Ubuntu defaults to btrfs.

I just looked and you're right.

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