People who want to move to a new version of the OS are of 2 types: I wanna do an upgrade, and I'll just reinstall.
2B) Invest in one of those "Custom build your own distro" tools that you frequently see advertised on this board - things with names like "sdm" and "RonR" and so on. Supposedly, these tools do solve the problem, but I've never reached the point of wanting to learn any of them.
And one final note, the problem is made much worse when you install the OS to a hard disk, because you then end up with your data on the same partition as the OS. It seems to me that if one wanted to do this right, you'd put your data on the hard disk but boot the OS from SD. I do not understand the obsession people seem to have with putting the OS on hard disk.
The wanna upgrade folks just want to be on the latest version with no muss no fuss, both during the upgrade and afterwards. Everything should just work. And, it generally does, sort of, kind of. Probably depends a lot on what else has been done to the system that isn't part of the upgrade. At best there will be some previous version config files left around. At worst...you do have a backup?
Many of the just reinstall folks (I'm admittedly one) know that stuff happens during upgrades, maybe don't like systems accumulating "system-type" cruft over the years, may see a rebuild as an opportunity to test that the notes you recorded are actually good, or may want to get as much possible as scripted so that fewer notes are required.
Another benefit I personally get from just reinstalling is that I use the same base configuration on my vast pi network
, so once I have a working base configuration for the new OS (service configurations, editors, config files, bashrc, etc) I can easily burn the disks for each Pi system with it's unique config (services, etc) installed. I know that BigRedMailbox doesn't have the need for such tools, but if you are...Statistics: Posted by bls — Wed Sep 03, 2025 8:58 pm