If hard disk space is not a problem , install 14.04
alongside 12.04
. I had this same dilemma, I installed 14.04
alongside 12.04
and after a couple of days I completely moved to 14.04
. You will almost find no difficulty in migrating, and 14.04
has lot of good improvements over 12.04
Couple of pointers if you are planning to install 14.04 alongside 12.04,
- Move your home folder to a seperate drive if it is not already in a seperate drive. There is a thorough guide on this here. And when installing
14.04
, mention this drive as your home
partition.
- You might find a couple of pointers here on how you can backup your software installations. Be careful, when following these steps. In my opinion, it is safe to get the list of your
12.04
installations manually and reinstall them in 14.04
. I ran into some problems when I tried dpkg --set-selections
. So, I highly recommend you to gradually migrate by reinstalling all your 12.04
softwares manually in 14.04
even if it takes some time to do it.
PS: When I was migrating I asked this question on how to backup my software installations. I was (and still am) confused on the doubts I raised in my above question, and I ended up manually installing all my 12.04
softwares in 14.04
based on the comments.
PS1 Can someone clear on this doubt I raised in this question ? If I copy apt sources
from one distribution to other (like from 12.04 to 14.04) and apt-get update
is run, will the distribution code name be automatically replaced (like precise
to 'trusty'). If yes, is it a safe way of backing up software installations ?