Truthfully, I *prefer* a full OS wipe-and-reinstall periodically.

(Note: I'm saying an *OS* wipe-and-reinstall. I always dedicate one
partition to the OS itself and maintain any local/user data elsewhere.
I find the idea of storing user files under /home on the root partition
abhorent now that we have disks large enough that we can create separate
partitions without having to nickle-and-dime the storage allocations.)

There are just too many "crufties" that can be hidden away in a
continuous-upgraded system for me to be fully comfortable with them.
Things that have been tweaked, stored, tested, backed up, squirreled
away and/or just plain forgotten.

And let's face it, doing a full *planned* reinstall of a RedHat-based
system (or that of any other Linux variant, I presume) is not
prohibitively difficult. Compare this with a reinstallation of Window:
do the initial install, reboot, wait for updates, reboot, wait for more
updates, reboot, wait for more updates, ... ad nauseum.

If one is considering the effort needed to maintain the configuration of
various bits of software, the unix philosophy of text-based configuration
files (though systemd may endanger this) means that one can save a backup
of these files and diff them or just use them for reference to reconfigure
the system post-reinstall.


On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 10:44:55PM +0000, Dave Dykstra wrote:
> Hi Yasha,
> 
> Yes this is one of the most significant differences between the Debian/
> dpkg/apt world and the Red Hat/SUSE/rpm/yum/dnf world.  It's a
> difference in philosophy and it is reflected in the tooling.  There are
> a lot more explicit package version dependencies in Debian that makes
> this possible.  On the other hand there's a lot less backporting that
> goes on there, so there's more instability.  I think that the
> requirement of going through extra effort every 5 to 10 years to do a
> reinstall from scratch is a deliberate choice in the rpm world.  I like
> the relative ease of Debian upgrades, but it does have some
> disadvantages too because you end up not upgrading some things.  For
> instance I haven't done a fresh install in around 20 years on my home
> Debian server, so as a consequence it is still using 32-bit executables
> even though the hardware has long been capable of 64-bit.
> 
> Fedora releases are much shorter life and I've heard there's a tool
> there to upgrade between releases more seamlessly, although I haven't
> used it myself.
> 
> Dave

-- 
Dr. William R. Somsky           	                   [log in to unmask]
Department of Physics, Box 351560		    B217 Phys-Astro Bldg
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