You don't have to reinstall to upgrade a debian system from one stable
release to the next. Sometimes the upgrade does fail and rarely, this
can have disasterous results. So make a backup first. You can also do
continuous upgrades by running the testing release instead of the stable
release of debian. Even that isn't entirely without risk as a nightly or
weekly upgrade might break something. But I would imagine arch has that
problem too because it's caused by linux package developers not being
perfect. If you don't want to go through the massive upgrade every 2
years from one stable debian release to the next, I'd recommend you try
the debian testing release and do nightly upgrades. That name "testing"
is really a misnomer. It's not like this stuff hasn't been tested. And
you could say that everything is in the process of being tested. The
distinction between a stable and a testing package is rather ill-defined.
Here at the Math Department at the University Of Wisconsin, I switched
our workstations over from debian stable to ubuntu short time support or
STS. A new release of ubuntu STS comes out every 6 months. Then I do
upgrades in January and July when the students are gone. Ubuntu has a
release upgrader program for doing upgrades.
On 08/01/2016 12:18 PM, John J. Boyer wrote:
That is the latest stable version of Debian? I am curently using Jessie.
I like the idea of ArchLinux, because it never requires re-installation.
Why don't the other distros take a similar approach? However, i don't
want to start with the bare-bones installation that is downloadable. I
would like one that includes brltty, internet access and the package
manager.
Thanks,
John
--
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John G. Heim; jheim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; sip://jheim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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