Pjotr wrote: ⤴Fri Aug 05, 2022 4:57 pm
my opinion is (ceterum censeo) that installing Mint 21 should always be done freshly and cleanly.
Last time I did that, it took months of discovering missing tweaks and hacks I had apparently done myself before slowly feeling at home again in my own laptop. Quite frustrating, because of course I had forgotten how to do each of them. The most obvious one I remember vividly is that from 18 to 19 and to my surprise even 20 the brightness controls do not control the brightness on my once too new but eventually old OLED laptop, so I had to
do it myself.
That's why it's so tempting to upgrade. After (still) missing a lot of things (even though I wrote the most basic stuff down in ansible) I had baked into 19 in a freshly installed 20, I just restored a disk image of 19 and did an upgrade from there because I underestimated the things I became used to and I was on a deadline. So now I have 4 more years of accumulated and forgotten things I rely on every day, and it's very tempting to upgrade again.
No one likes to move. No one likes to pack everything in their house, put it in a truck, drive across the country and unload everything in the new house. Especially when you cannot see the things you need to pack.
That said, you are absolutely right. A fresh and clean install fixes a lot of potential problems, and will probably boot faster even if there are no problems. I just wish there was some smart tool that would find and list all the changes I have made over the last 4 years, no matter where I put them, and I could pick and choose which ones to store in an ansible script or something. And I'm not even talking about the easy stuff like packages, home configuration, groups i.e. what aptik does.