I've used Debian pretty much every day since the first day I installed it, which helps.
do you upgrade from major versions (e.g. 7 -> 8) via reinstall or their in-place process? I've seen some burned by the latter. Maybe you've got 7 partitions instead of 1, like those who paid attention to partitioning advice?
Personally I do upgrade-in-place -- my main home machine is an in-place upgrade from its original install of Debian 0.93r6 back in 1996 or so (with different hardware now, of course). Some upgrades have been hairier than others, but fixing up any fallout has always been much easier than doing a clean install, restoring user data and trying to recreate all the configuration tweaks.
Crossgrading from i386 to x86-64 was a particular bear, and I have vague memories that the a.out to ELF transition might have been awkward too...
> my main home machine is an in-place upgrade from its original install of Debian 0.93r6 back in 1996 or so.
That's absolutely marvellous.
Re:Installing Debian Linux 2.0 (1998)
by jbverschoor on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @02:02AM
(#20806717)
My Mac is 12 years worth of installs of betas, upgrades, etc
I heard a piece on NPR on Linux. I had played with Dos for Dummies and got my parents to buy a copy of Suse 5. After a harrowing 6 hour installation process on my parent's 33MHz 386, I needed the discard rescue floppy to recover the Windows boot.
I would've been a programmer at that age but lacked mentor/support.