long wait...

[Timothy Murphy]

Tim wrote:

>> As this is my main computer where all of my stuff lives, setting the
>> whole thing up again from scratch would probably take the better part of
>> a day and a fair bit of thought, not to mention that there is always one
>> little thing that I manage to forget about until something suddenly
>> doesn't happen the way that it should.
> 
> In the dim and distant past, I'd tried upgrades, and spent ages ironing
> out the bugs.  Later, I did fresh installs, and spent a much lesser
> amount of time customising the new install.  Apart from the time, this
> seemed to be the differences:  One is just re-configuring, the other is
> sorting out all the problems that aren't handled by the update process.

My experience is the opposite.
I've had more problems with clean installations than with upgrades.
The worst problem is if you do a clean installation 
and it just does not work.

I don't recall ever having "bugs" with an upgrade.
What kind of bugs did you have?

But with all the spare disk space nowadays, I usually do both;
upgrade on the current partition,
and if that works I do a clean installation on another partition.

Incidentally, I upgraded to F-8 on one machine (AMD-64) last night,
and it was astonishingly fast;
it took less than 45 minutes to install around 950 packages.