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Comment by NDizzle | Hacker News Reader

Which versions of linux cleanly update? What do I do with an old Centos 7 system?

Fedora cleanly updates and is nearly identical to CentOS. It's also the distro that Linus Torvalds uses on his personal systems because it stays very current with regards to the kernel, and he doesn't have to worry about the small stuff because the Fedora project team members do a stellar job.

Plenty of Linux flavors update seamlessly. Update it or migrate to a new flavor. You might like Debian if you liked CentOS enough to keep a machine running it.

Debian does, it is one of the reasons why I eventually made it my default choice for new long-term installations. Before I used Debian I tested SLS, Slackware, Yggdrasil and Redhat. I have run Caldera, Ubuntu and Mint as well as a bunch of special-purpose distributions (Raspbian, Puppy, LTSP on iOpeners, OpenWRT, etc.) but Debian is where it is at if it has to run for a long time spanning several upgrades.

Ubuntu does. I do a fresh install of Kubuntu every couple of years, and in-place upgrades in between. With fresh installs, I make a file image of the old OS partition with dd and mount it from within the new system to copy across /etc files and settings (and I keep track of all of that in a text file to use as a manual script next time). The separate /home partition doesn't get changed at all.

For how many years have you had the same server running Ubuntu? Which version did you start with? LTS upgrades only? I don't want to update but once every 5 years or so.

The PC I'm on is from 2012 (well, its motherboard and CPU are; everything else has been upgraded at least once, and I plan to do a new build from scratch this year), and has been running Kubuntu the whole time, as did my previous PC. I don't stick to LTS releases, as sometimes I want updated software from newer ones. If you do update to non-LTS releases, you have to keep updating, as the non-LTS releases stop getting updates and security fixes after a year.

I set things up in a way that makes a fresh install (rather than an update) pretty painless anyway. I always have a dedicated /home partition, which stays untouched by any update or reinstall, so all app settings are just carried through. Before I moved to a more space-limited SSD for the OS partition, I had multiple OS partitions available, so I could leave the old OS intact on one, but I pretty much never booted the old one, so an image in a file does the job just as well. I document all my setup steps in a text file and follow that, updating it as I go, for the setup of the next fresh install.

I wouldn't recommend going 5 years between updates, for security reasons, but every two years between LTS releases would be fine. You could look into distrobox for running more up-to-date apps - I've done that a bit.

> Which versions of linux cleanly update?

Most of them, these days.

> What do I do with an old Centos 7 system?

Compare apples to oranges, since CentOS was discontinued, and then move forward anyways because https://almalinux.org/elevate/ has you covered.

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