easy to upgrade OS (was Re: DVCS)

[Christopher Nicholson-Sauls]

On 01/22/11 03:57, spir wrote:
> On 01/22/2011 09:58 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Gour wrote:
>>> I'm very seriously considering to put PC-BSD on my desktop and of
>>> several others in order to reduce my admin-time required to maint. all
>>> those machines.
>>
>> OSX is the only OS (besides DOS) I've had that had painless upgrades.
>> Windows upgrades never ever work in place (at least not for me). You
>> have to wipe the disk, install from scratch, then reinstall all your
>> apps and reconfigure them.
> 
> Same in my experience. I had to recently re-install from scratch my
> ubuntu box recently (recently why I have the same amusing info as Walter
> telling my machine runs ubuntu 11.04?) because 10.04 --> 10.10 upgrade
> miserably crashed (at the end of the procedure, indeed).
> 
> And no, this is not due to me naughtily the system; instead while
> userland is highly personalised I do not touch the rest (mainly my brain
> cannot cope with the standard unix filesystem hierarchy).
> 
> (I use linux only for philosophical reasons, else would happily switch
> to mac.)
> 
> Denis
> _________________
> vita es estrany
> spir.wikidot.com
> 

Likewise I had occasional issues with Ubuntu/Kubuntu upgrades when I was
using it.  Moving to a "rolling release" style distribution (Gentoo)
changed everything for me.  I haven't had a single major issue since.
(I put "major" in there because there have been issues, but of the
"glance at the screen, notice the blocker, type out the one very short
command that will fix it, continue updating" variety.)

Heck, updating has proven so straight-forward that I check for updates
almost daily.  I originally went to Linux for "philosophical" reasons,
as well, but now that I've had a taste of a "real distro" I really don't
have any interest in toying around with anything else.

I do have a Windows install for development/testing purposes though...
running in a VM.  ;)  Amazingly enough, Windows seems to be perfectly
happy running as a guest O/S.  If it was possible to do the same with OS
X, I would.  (Anyone know a little trick for that, using VirtualBox?)

-- Chris N-S