To format or not to format

[mick.kde]

"To format or not to format, that is the question."
- Shakespeare

(Not that one, but Billy Bob Shakespeare. He and his wife Wanda live near the Nashville Wal-mart and he picks a little guitar when he's not messing with his computer. )

With the final beta release of 20.04, I am now seriously thinking about the upgrade. As most of us have time on our hands with the virus lockdown, I too am looking for interesting activities to fill the days.

Through my 20+ years with Linux, I've usually used three partitions, root, swap and home. When upgrading, I've always reformatted the root partition and often reformatted the home partition too, after backing up my data. It takes some work, as the data must be copied back, programs must be configured and in some cases, re-installed and configured.

I'm always open to different ideas though. Is there a better way to do it? I'm a Kubuntu newbie and would appreciate your opinions.

Mick

[Snowhog]

In part, it depends on what version of Kubuntu you are currently running. IF it's 19.10 AND you don't have any third-party PPAs in use AND you don't have non-repository (supported and/or PPA) applications installed -- downloaded from the 'Net and installed manually -- performing a version upgrade to 20.04 (from the command line) should be straight forward. Take a look at this: https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-upgra...ts-focal-fossa

[claydoh]

I have for many years now upgraded in place. No formatting. I use a number of PPAs and have at times had some manually installed non-repo packages for software, and have had zero issue upgrading for those years.

The installer does disable all PPAs beforehand, so you will not need to disable them yourself. Some PPAs won't have 20.04 repos right off the bat, so don't be alarmed if you see errors when trying to update using them when re-enabled.

It boils down to how much you trust things, or fear a borked upgrade.

[MoonRise]

Here just the past few days for the same reason I upgraded my Desktop by complete new install from 18.04. I formatted ""/" and "swap" but of course I left "/home" as is. Went very well. Very pleased.

For my laptop I've been sequentially updating it since 18.04. Was on 19.10 and forced the update to Focal and even that wen well and speedy. No issue there either.

Over all very pleasant experience. Hope the same for you as well.

[Don B. Cilly]

I was wondering the same thing... on one hand I don't have much of an issue with clean installs... on the other...
... lately, some (very few) applications that I like require rather... inordinate ;·) efforts to move to later versions.
Which is one of the reasons I'm not really moving my daily stuff to K20 - which I like.

Now, in this post on the KDE forum, claydoh's dog says "At some point after the next Ubuntu LTS is released (20.04, in April), Neon will offer a prompt to upgrade the whole OS to the new LTS.". I'm using the "Testing" version of neon (reasons irrelevant) so I hope I'll be able to upgrade from that to the 20 LTS.
I really have no use for Testing anymore.

[claydoh]

Now, in this post on the KDE forum, claydoh's dog says "At some point after the next Ubuntu LTS is released (20.04, in April), Neon will offer a prompt to upgrade the whole OS to the new LTS.". I'm using the "Testing" version of neon (reasons irrelevant) so I hope I'll be able to upgrade from that to the 20 LTS.I really have no use for Testing anymore.

That is my old rat terrier, Jake, who lived to be 18 years old, passed on around 2008.. He truly was not scary at all, that image was of me teasing the heck out of him, using Bill, the cat.

Anyhoo, you will be prompted to upgrade, but you'll still be on the Testing variant, as far as I know. the part that is upgrading here is the base, not so much the desktop side.

[jlittle]

Through my 20+ years with Linux, I've usually used three partitions, root, swap and home...

I'm always open to different ideas though. Is there a better way to do it?

Yes, IMO. Use btrfs.

On a simple install on a new computer with one storage device, you'd have a small EFI system partition, maybe a swap, and the rest a btrfs. For btrfs the *buntu installer silently puts root and home in separate subvolumes, @ and @home, which gives the same separation that root and home partitions do. With a typical computer with an SSD and a hard drive the second drive would be one big btrfs, to facilitate btrfs send/receive backups.

As for clean install versus upgrade in place, this forum has very divergent opinions. On one side you've got claydoh who has upgraded in place for "many years", and on the other you've got GreyGeek who rarely passes on the opportunity to urge "clean" installs^*. IMO it depends how much work a clean install needs to get it fully functional with software installed and configured, and settings changed. For me, it takes many days before everything is just right. I tend to do a clean install every so often, maybe every LTS, but sometimes hardware or software failures have encouraged the clean install. I'm trying to work up a clean Focal Fossa install, to discard accumulated cruft, but after a few long sessions I've still got a long way to go.

With btrfs, you can have "a bob each way"^† and try both. Snapshot, do the release upgrade, check it out, and if not ok go back to the snapshot in seconds, not the fraught full restore from backup that a non-snapshotting fs requires.

^* "clean" means a new home directory. IME it's been a good idea when KDE got a new major version, like 3 to 4 and 4 to plasma.

^†do Americans say "a dime each way" to have a small bet on each alternative?

[Qqmike]

I always do a clean install, from scratch, thinking-feeling that ...

1 It cleans up the drive/partitions (I'm not sure what I mean by that, it is only a feeling);
2 I feel more in control of everything, starting over from scratch;
and
3 I do it for the practice of drive-management and partitioning and then installing Kubuntu from the get-go, from scratch, even though that means re-installing apps and configuring this and that.

IOW, my reasons are not totally rational, but it's my computer and I get to make the rules.

[Don B. Cilly]

... you will be prompted to upgrade, but you'll still be on the Testing variant, as far as I know.

That should be fine, actually. Testing is good enough, no real hassle.
Still, in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/neon.list I have:
deb http://archive.neon.kde.org/testing bionic main
deb-src http://archive.neon.kde.org/testing bionic main

If I change that to the "stable" repos (whatever they are called)... wouldn't I effectively have a Stable neon?

Even though... in this Reddit post acheronuk says:
"The Testing edition is essentially the git-stable edition, renamed to something that is less confusing to most people. It gets changes from the stable branches of Plasma, Applications and other KDE software. Where there is intentionally no stable branch (e.g. Frameworks which is developed on and released from its master branch), there will be builds from that when changes occur."

which I find slightly confusing but kind of vaguely reassuring :·)

[GreyGeek]

"To format or not to format, that is the question."
- Shakespeare

....

IMCHO, the biggest mistakes one can make when moving to a new version release is NOT do a clean, formatted install and NOT use BTRFS as the filesystem.

Adding to what jlittle said, if one wants to create subvolumes separate from @ (root) and @home (/home) it is an easy matter to mount the drive (even while you are running on it) to /mnt and then create another subvolume, say, @data.

sudo -i
mount /dev/disk/by-uuid/ce2b5741-c01e-4b3d-b6ba-401ad7f7fcdf /mnt
# vdir /mnt
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 200 Jan  9 23:21 @
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  30 Jan  5 12:15 @home
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 176 Apr  5 11:43 snapshots (a regular dir where I keep my snapshots)[FONT=arial]

btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@data
[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]# vdir /mnt
[/FONT]total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 200 Jan  9 23:21 @
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  30 Jan  5 12:15 @home
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 200 Jan  9 23:21 @data
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 176 Apr  5 11:43 snapshots

Now, @data is NOT visible from the system unless it is mounted in /etc/fstab or manually as root.
So, say I create a subdirectory under my home account called /home/jerry/data then I can bind that subdirectory to @data in fstab.

UUID=ce2b5741-c01e-4b3d-b6ba-401ad7f7fcdf /home/jerry/data           btrfs   defaults,subvol=@data 0       2

When I take a snapshot of @home it will NOT contain @data. I must take a snapshot of @data independently of @home.
@data could be created on a 2nd drive and bound that same way, making it independent of the drive @ and @home are on. Etc...

[claydoh]

Hoh boy, you mean i have been making mistakes all this time?
I do have a separate $HOME, been doing that since probably 2005, if not long before I was using Kubuntu.

[jglen490]

So when the actual, no-longer-beta version of Focal is released, I'll be doing a fresh install. I've been doing a fresh install for a few years, going from LTS to LTS - just because I can. I have no concerns with efficiency of the upgrade method, or necessarily Spring-cleaning, I just get a good result. And sometimes I've freshened up the hardware. That's what I'm doing this time.

I've been using spinners for a long time, but when i went to 18.04, I chose to install the / and the SWAP partitions onto an SSD, and left /home on a spinner. It was fine and the SSD has performed well. This time I'm going to a smaller SSD for / (240GB to 120GB), no SWAP at all (16GB RAM), and /home on a 500GB SSD. I anticipate no errors with this process and UEFI was happy with the mix of hardware - no reason to believe otherwise (then or now).

I'm also giving thought to formatting the /home SSD with gparted, restoring /home from the spinner, and then installing Focal. I only use one PPA, the graphics one with proper NVIDIA drivers, and that will be easy to repeat, post-install. Everything else in /home will just use upgraded versions of current programs. Hey, if it doesn't work or if it seems to be more a of a pain in the butt than it's worth, then just install and then restore.

And as always, that's my story and I'm sticking it as well as sticking with ext4. Sorry GG, oshunlvr, jlittle - and a cast of others! But ext4 has never let me down, and with what I do with my computer, it's a perfect fit. See what happens around the end of the month!

[MoonRise]

Hoh boy, you mean i have been making mistakes all this time?
I do have a separate $HOME, been doing that since probably 2005, if not long before I was using Kubuntu.

I don't see it as a mistake. I do the same since about the same time. Even now. BTRFS may be better, but for now, the method I've been doing still works well for me. Then again, why I like Linux. What works best for me. As stated in this thread, many diverging ideas and reasons.

[claydoh]

That should be fine, actually. Testing is good enough, no real hassle.
Still, in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/neon.list I have:
deb http://archive.neon.kde.org/testing bionic main
deb-src http://archive.neon.kde.org/testing bionic main

If I change that to the "stable" repos (whatever they are called)... wouldn't I effectively have a Stable neon?
)

Eventually, after the versioning of packages in the User repo is higher than what the Testing ones are on your system. I don't fully grok how that works, after looking at the package versioning between the two, but my guess is that you'd still be on the Testing packages you would have at the time you switched, until the next Plasma version, possibly 5.19. The chances of version mismatches at some point are good, but it probably will be somewhat easy to fix. Easy-ish. Maybe.

User Edition
plasma-workspace 4:5.18.4.1-0xneon+18.04+bionic+build62

Testing, at least what is is on the iso
plasma-workspace 4:5.18.3+p18.04+git20200322.0057-0


You'd think that the User Ed. is a higher version, but I am not sure here at all.

[Don B. Cilly]

Thanks for the info.
I'll see about the upgrade if and when, after which - eventually - I'll see what changing repos does.
If I don't like either result, I can restore from backup.

I'm really quite happy with an 18.04-based Testing neon as it is.
It is, in fact, pretty much the same as K20, in the sense that the Plasma stuff is at the same level (just slightly higher Qt and FW versions, lower Kernel ones). Now, some base applications may become outdated if I can't/won't upgrade, but I don't use many, and a couple I use have become almost impossible to clean-upgrade ;·)