When to update?

[dedeman1]

Hey JL crowd. I was just curious if someone could give me a bit of insight into when to embrace a newer distro.

From what I can tell, is seems that many Linux distros have a farily (comparitively) fast revision schema. Less then a year ago, I was receiving Suse 9.1 pro in the mail. A year later, and 9.3 is out.

I feel an inclination to keep up with the latest distros, perhaps that they are "better" then the old one.

If anyone could shed some light on reasons to/not to jump ship when a new rev comes out, I would love to hear it.

Just fyi, I am not a guru by any means. I've been using Linux on/off for the last 5 years, usually when I have the time/feel the need to experiment.

Well, I'm off to dl Suse 9.3. Thanks for the help.

[happybunny]

only change if something is broken that you have now, or if the new rev offers some new feature you are lacking.

Also, if you YAST your 9.1 install, shouldn't that bring you up too 9.3? Why bother downloading the whole thing again and installing?

[dkeav]

some distrobutions you do not have to reinstall to keep up to date

ie one of the oldest debian systems i have was updated from woody to sarge to sid

[dedeman1]

I was under the impression that Suse only updates packages, not the entire disto itself. Of course, I could be entirely wrong about that. If there's anyone who would like to comment further, please do so.

BTW, just dl'd 9.3 dvd (not eval version), just in case I get the urge to kill a few hours.

[ehawk]

With fedora, I would just pop in the newer CD and update without losing anything from /home, changing partitions, etc. Never ran into problems. No big deal....

Haven't tried updating Mepis yet....whole disto, that is....synaptic is great so far for individual packages...