upgrading pc, need a clean Linux install?

[Knightxl]

So I've recently made the switch to 95% Linux. Mostly for school and gaming. I recently got the ok to upgrade my now 8 year old pc from the wife. My question is, should I just clean install pop os again or can I leave it and update drives and what not?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id do a clean install, gets rid of junk, and lets you use newer features like uefi. But probalby not needed. What hardware are you using?

[Sauron]

It depends on what the differences between the two systems are. It's possible (even likely) that it will "just work" if you keep the drive as is but you may be carrying over some junk you don't need like old drivers (or drivers for the wrong thing).

[Dutch_Master]

Yes, it mostly "just works", but there is a chance your upgrade goes belly up. The driver for your current GPU may not support a new GPU, which will leave you without a video signal to your monitor. Unlike Win-OS, on Linux the rest of the system will work, so you could log in remotely, provided you've enabled that option by installing the openssh-server package from the repositories beforehand. Also install the aptitude package, this is a text-based GUI for package management so you can use it remotely to uninstall the failed driver and install the new one.

[mamamia88]

13 hours ago, Dutch_Master said:

Yes, it mostly "just works", but there is a chance your upgrade goes belly up. The driver for your current GPU may not support a new GPU, which will leave you without a video signal to your monitor. Unlike Win-OS, on Linux the rest of the system will work, so you could log in remotely, provided you've enabled that option by installing the openssh-server package from the repositories beforehand. Also install the aptitude package, this is a text-based GUI for package management so you can use it remotely to uninstall the failed driver and install the new one.

The linux kernel itself has lots of drivers built in right? So a simple reboot to load the correct one (irrelevant if turned off to do the upgrade). I've had wifi not work on linux out of the box before but, always at least got a video display no matter what hardware I've used in the last 12 years. I would attempt the upgrade but, first make a screenshot of your settings and a list of apps. After that it's not really that big of a deal to reinstall the os when most of the stuff you need is included and the rest is just "sudo apt install or pacman -S etc" 

[Dutch_Master]

1 minute ago, mamamia88 said:

The linux kernel itself has lots of drivers built in right?

Yes. Much more then any other OS OOTB.

 

1 minute ago, mamamia88 said:

So a simple reboot to load the correct one (irrelevant if turned off to do the upgrade).

Not really. Proprietary GPU drivers are the one thing Linux doesn't include in the kernel, although those who can be redistributed under the GPL are generally present. The nouveau and radeon drivers are included but especially for nVidia cards, consensus is that these are inferior to the binary blob drivers nVidia offers.

[mamamia88]

2 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

Yes. Much more then any other OS OOTB.

 

Not really. Proprietary GPU drivers are the one thing Linux doesn't include in the kernel, although those who can be redistributed under the GPL are generally present. The nouveau and radeon drivers are included but especially for nVidia cards, consensus is that these are inferior to the binary blob drivers nVidia offers.

Ah ok. So it should still work though if going from nvidia to nvidia or amd to amd? And even if it's amd to nvidia the noveau driver at the very least would load? 

[Dutch_Master]

You have a fair chance Linux will load a video driver, even if just VESA   What you also need to realise is that especially nVidia (again) is moving support for older cards away from the main driver and into legacy driver packages. It's generally not a problem, if you know which driver you need (legacy or current) for your card. AMD is doing the same, but in my perception less aggressively.

[Knightxl]

So realistically it can work but there's some potential it causes issues and is just have to clean install anyway. I mean it really only took me a few hours of set up to get where I am now and I'll prolly be able to go a bit faster now. Thanks everyone for their input! I appreciate you all!

[kelvinhall05]

Depends on the hardware differences but it's good practice to reinstall occasionally so I'd just do it this time.