Should I update to 14.04 LTS or make a re-installation to 14.04 LTS?

Question

I'm now using 12.04 LTS, and I don't like to update because it sometimes causes problems and I need my laptop fully functional these days.

But recently, most of the software I need for my thesis (I'm a chemistry student) requires to update to a more recent version of Ubuntu to install the most recent version and have new characteristics and bugs fixed.

So the question here is: What should I do? Should I take the risk of updating, or maybe is better to download 14.04 and make a re-installation?

This is considering that I have my Home folder in a separated partition from "/"

Thanks in advance...

Answer 1

I've done the update 12.04 to 14.04 on several installations, did not really have any issues yet. YMMV of course.

But I'd recommend to try the update first, if it goes horribly wrong, nothing is stopping you from doing a re-install.

There is an option in the installer, not exactly sure about the wording, but it says "install over my existing ubuntu installation", that will just do a fresh install of the OS but leave your user data intact.

Remember to make a backup of your data before trying upgrade or fresh install though, just in case :-)

Answer 2

So the question here is: What should I do? Should I take the risk of updating, or maybe is better to download 14.04 and make a re-installation?

Whatever you want. Please do not forget that we expect you to make a backup. I tend to do a re-install myself because I install and delete a lot to test software and this is a good way for me to be sure I reset to a fresh system.

This is considering that I have my Home folder in a separated partition from "/"

That does not matter. You can opt during installation to keep your documents even if /home is not on a different partition.

I myself use an empty /home and symlink the directories to a partition called /discworld. That way I can keep files in /home/$USER I do not care about when they get deleted since all the important stuff is on another disk.