Question please. Old-hat PC user looking to ditch Windows. I've been running Lubuntu 18.04 LTS for several months and love it. Got it tweaked with compton and even running LTspice and Fusion360 through Wine. Then I saw Lubuntu 19.04 and love the updates, but can't switch as it would mean reinstalling everything and redoing all of the customizations. Is there any easy way around that?

Perhaps a method? Can a second disk, SDB, be mounted as /home/me, stuff installed for my user only, and this moved to a new version without too much hassle? I can imagine this is fought with peril as well. No such thing as a free lunch?

@rdtsc I'm not an Lubuntu user, but see manual.lubuntu.me/stable/D/upgrading.html

@AndrasDeak Yes, I see. Is this having an effect on the site?

@rdtsc You can normally upgrade.

Customizations normally correspond to files in ~ (user directory) and /etc.

You should save those before doing an upgrade

@FaheemMitha I haven't seen anything yet, but I don't moderate much anymore. Mods might be able to tell the difference.

@AndrasDeak Are you, or were you a mod? You're not listed.

@FaheemMitha no :)

just a nosy high-rep

@AndrasDeak Ok.

I don't suppose SE has scheduled any new elections in light of the resignations? I haven't seen anything.

There's a lot to think about new elections. Mod shortage mostly affects smaller sites. But if they organize elections they'll mostly get the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, and hopefully they are aware of that. Plus you need community managers to organize elections, and well, they've fired or driven away most of them.

@AndrasDeak Bottom of the barrel seems a bit harsh. But good point about the community managers.

Not entirely, but there's a strong correlation between ability to moderate the sites fairly and extent of being put off by the company's recent-ish actions. For sure they'd find a mod or two who's both capable and doesn't give a hoot about the whole thing, but for each of these there would be ten incompetents, power-hungry sociopaths and trolls.

There's at least one infamous troll who's been trying to become a mod all over the place, and I've heard more than one person say that they'll burn their accounts if that users ends up being a mod (with all the PII lying around that mods can see).

@AndrasDeak Oh, you mean in the context of the recent SE actions? In that case, that's also a good point.

I suspect most people who would have been interested in being SE mods are probably now less interested.

@FaheemMitha yes, entirely in light of that. In peacetime there would always be plenty of quality backup to replenish mods.

@AndrasDeak Peacetime. :-) Good one.

@AndrasDeak For a moment I thought you were speaking generally. My mistake. Apologies.

nah, no worries

@JeffSchaller I've tried that before in several linux virtual machines, and while it does upgrade things, usually something doesn't work right afterwards. Since I'm not a pro in Linux, this often means many hours trying to figure out work-arounds and possibly reinstalling anyways. I was hoping there was some other way to handle frequent upgrades.

@rdtsc It really should be painless. Just keep your home in a separate partition and then install the new system, keeping the same home. Or use a rolling distribution like arch. Or, if your distro offers one, try the dist-upgrade method. I think you were on an Ubuntu flavor, right? You should be able to just upgrade with no problem as long as you don't skip too many releases.

I've been doing that ^ for, uh, a long time (8 years, maybe more). I backup anyway, but the separate home partition makes it pretty painless to do major upgrades.

never had any issues with upgrades, minor nor major

you just have to accept that some cruft might accumulate in your home over a long time

@rdtsc Upgrading shouldn't normally break stuff. If it does, file a bug.

Thank you all for your input.