Simply installing New Releases

[limotux]

Question #1: for about 5 years. For example MX 19 was released in Oct 2019 and all support ends in June 2024

I see I am getting a bit closer!
Well, doing a fresh install in 5 years sound OK and reasonable.
This can be added to what I mentioned in step 3.
After the 5 years will still be getting security updates? Or it would be completely over!

[j2mcgreg]

Question #1: for about 5 years. For example MX 19 was released in Oct 2019 and all support ends in June 2024

I see I am getting a bit closer!
Well, doing a fresh install in 5 years sound OK and reasonable.
This can be added to what I mentioned in step 3.
After the 5 years will still be getting security updates? Or it would be completely over!

Security updates will have ended as well.

[thinkpadx]

outside working - but if you mean for example - 21.1 to 21.2 - 21.3 ersions all is well for mx 21 - mx 23 - no repos not possible - that is why a clean install is needed too. the point upgrades are all good. i have been using since late mx 17 and literally never an issue.

[Jakob77]

limotux

I can also vote for MX working in the direction of using automatic rolling upgrades.
However I used rolling upgrade with Xubuntu for approximately 5 years and then it began to fall apart.
That is really not nice when you depend on the computer and want to keep your data safe for the last backup.


Now I use MX 21 Wildflower.
An you can see here the lifetime for it is also approximately 5 years but likely and hopefully with the big difference that MX won't fall apart:
https://endoflife.date/mxlinux



Freja

I guess you got the idea from the MX-tool where you can copy the home folder to another user and make them similar.
Never say never and I understand you want it but I can't see how it can work on a random computer.
There can for instance be databases for Thunderbird and Firefox that needs to fit the installed program version number, and I fail to see how a tool can fix that elegantly.

[asqwerth]

Question #1: for about 5 years. For example MX 19 was released in Oct 2019 and all support ends in June 2024

I see I am getting a bit closer!
Well, doing a fresh install in 5 years sound OK and reasonable.
This can be added to what I mentioned in step 3.
After the 5 years will still be getting security updates? Or it would be completely over!

Completely over. It will of course continue to run but no updates at all will come in henceforth.

As for rolling distros saving you the bother of not installing again, the time you save by not installing again is lost/spent in other things (ok, I exclude PCLinuxOS, Solus and Void from this as they normally need very little care during updates**):
1. frequent and numerous updates - so you spend more time overall downloading updated packages than it takes to download a new iso for MX every 5 years. Say I update my Anarchy (Arch-based) install every 2 weeks, I have to download maybe 1 GB of packages (roughly 80 - 100+ packages) each time. Yes you can update more frequently so each download is smaller, but the added/accumulated size of all the downloads will be the same. Once a month, Debian might roll up a whole bunch of security updates but what's large for the Debian Stable update once a month is pretty small when compared to weekly Arch updates.

2. when you update, either you spend more time checking update news in case of gotchas and required manual intervention before the update (eg recently Arch completed their git migration and the recommended update command was different and you had to edit your pacman.conf), or you might have to spend some time sorting out issues that arise after the update. Normally you don't need to worry about all this in fixed release distros. Updates are more "brainless", though you should still keep an eye on the update confirmation message to make sure no drastic removal of key packages is going to happen (usually that means something is wrong).

3. for Arch-based distros, you have to keep an eye on pacnew files and sometimes manual changes to conf files have to be effected.

**Even PCLOS recently had an important announcement (to install network manager and its plugins to replace their old network program) which I missed because I assumed they were "safe" and never checked their update announcements. In the end I had to use MX's chroot-rescue-scan to chroot into my PCLOS install to manually install the necessary network packages because I lost my network connection.

So there are pros and cons to both fixed and rolling distros.

If you really want to try manually upgrading MX from one Debian release to the next, then don't follow commands from external sources. Wait for the new release to be officially out, and for MX devs to issue their advisory for an unofficial upgrade path that you can do at your own risk.

[CharlesV]

For me, when I am ready to move to a new MX version, I run this script on my old machine, which shows me what *I* have installed, and then use it to decide what I want to install on my new machine.

Code: Select all

comm -23 <(apt-mark showmanual | sed 's/[: \t].*$//' | sort -u) <( { sed 's/[: \t].*$//' /usr/share/antiX/installed-packages.txt ; dpkg-query -W -f '${Depends}\n' | sed 's/([^)]*)//g; s/ //g; s/,/\n/g' | grep -vF '|' ; } | sort -u) > Packages-installed-by-me.txt

I then use this file to create a script to install apps that I still want, and then use the script to install it all.

I also create my new machine 100% in a VM, then once it is tested and ready to roll, I snapshot it, write it out to a pocket drive and then install to my machine. (Testing several times along the way on other machines before I overwrite mine:-) )

And, of course, I have backups and have also just copied out my home folder and everything under it.

[richb]

Is that script different than the MX tool "User Installed Packages"? The output looks the same.

[Stevo]

Yes, MX's UIP is intended to make major MX base upgrades as painless as possible. Just preserve your home during the reinstall and use the UIP to restore any non-default packages.

If you've made any customizations outside of your home folder, though, it's still up to you to remember what you did and restore those.

[asqwerth]

UIP is not found in mx19 AFAIK, so users upgrading from 19 to 23 will have to use that script.

[AA BB]

CharlesV wrote:

" I run this script on my old machine, which shows me what *I* have installed, and then use it to decide what I want to install on my new machine.
CODE: SELECT ALL
comm -23 <(apt-mark showmanual | sed 's/[: \t].*$//' | sort -u) <( { sed 's/[: \t].*$//' /usr/share/antiX/installed-packages.txt ; dpkg-query -W -f '${Depends}\n' | sed 's/([^)]*)//g; s/ //g; s/,/\n/g' | grep -vF '|' ; } | sort -u) > Packages-installed-by-me.txt"
"


Is there a script to show what was deleted ??