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I am using Ubuntu 15.10 and wish to upgrade to ubuntu 16.10 ( after the final release on October 13th). Should I upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 or Ubuntu 16.10? Which one would be better and reliable? Thanks.

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  • One has LTS (Long Term Support),i.e., 5 years of support whereas the other is (will be) just an interim release with 9 months support only. Your choice.
    – user589808
    Oct 1, 2016 at 0:55
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    No that's the opposite of what I just commented: Test both in a LIVE session. Live means not installed, running from the USB flash drive, the same one(s) you would be using to install.
    – user589808
    Oct 1, 2016 at 1:14
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    There is no direct upgrade path from 15.10 (which is outdated, you should have already upgraded!) to 16.10, you have to upgrade to 16.04 at first anyway, which I recommend doing as soon as possible as 15.10 is no longer supported.
    – Byte Commander
    Oct 1, 2016 at 1:20
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    But that defeats the purpose of this question, since I have to download both Ubuntu (which I don't want to because I have limited data on my Internet plans ). Oct 1, 2016 at 1:23
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    @PrashantKumar there is no "in general" for anything having to do with computers. Oct 1, 2016 at 2:13

1 Answer 1

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Short Answer: Upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Medium Answer: Upgrade to 16.10 only if you are certain there is something in 16.10 that you can't have in 16.04. For example, your hardware is not fully supported in 16.04, so you need the newer kernel in 16.10 for all your hardware to work.

Long Answer: Upgrade to neither. Do a clean install of 16.04 in a spare partition. A good set-up will be:

  • Make a separate /home partition, if you haven't done so already with 15.10.
  • You will end up with 4 partitions: swap, root0 (15.10), empty root1 (16.04) and home.
  • root partition don't have to be big, about 10 to 16 GB each will be enough.
  • install 16.04 to the empty spare root partition. Point to the existing /home partition during installation. Make sure to tell the installer NOT to format the /home partition. Specify a different user name if you want to keep 15.10 data untouched by 16.04.

The beauty of this set-up is you don't ever have to ask this question again. You can install the newer version while keeping your current installation. This allows you to take your time customizing and/or evaluating the newer version. It also ensures that you have a working system if something goes wrong with the newer installation.

Assuming you finally migrated to the newer version, the old root partition now becomes your spare partition. When a newer version is released, you can repeat the same process over and over again, ad infinitum.

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    Duncan I'm too pleased to read your answer. That's a great way of installation. A few months back, as I work only on ubuntu, I erased the whole disk of my laptop and used all the space to install ubuntu16.04. Now the big problem is my 16.04 got so corrupted that I can't use it at all. When I log in the system something on its own happen, I can't control it. As I have no other system installed alongside, I'm left with no option that to visit my acquaintance place and use his computer to create a bootable USB drive. Thanks for your valuable suggestion to have earlier installation there.
    – Ravi
    Oct 14, 2016 at 10:31

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