On 7/13/05, Mike McCarty <mike.mccarty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > IMO Mode on: > > A better argument is that if Linux is ever to overtake W* as a user-friendly > OS, it had better find a way to upgrade W/O smashing all user data. It's called putting your /home partition on a separate disk or partition and being smart about your system planning. Back up /etc and /var before upgrading (preferably, back them up periodically even if you're not planning on upgrading!). Don't upgrade, re-install. It's cleaner and you'll have less problems. I've run every version of Red Hat and Fedora since RH 7.3, and even switched to Debian, Ubuntu, and SuSE at various times without losing a byte of user data. It's possible. It's easy if you know how. And there has been at least one discussion on the possibility of adding a user-level backup/migration tool to GNOME that I know of, so it's not like the idea hasn't been floated before... but developers are needed. (And I dispute that Windows (there, I said it) is any better when upgrading than Linux is, it just happens less often is all. But that's not something I'll argue on this list.) > Period. > > End of argument. > > If overtaking W* is not a goal, then whatever floats your boat is fine. (Why would we want to overtake Windows? That's just not going to happen. The expectation that Linux is designed to do so is just ridiculous. But again, that's not what we're here to discuss.) -- Ben Steeves _ bcs@xxxxxxxxxx The ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) ben.steeves@xxxxxxxxx against HTML e-mail X GPG ID: 0xB3EBF1D9 http://www.metacon.ca/bcs / \ Yahoo Messenger: ben_steeves
