The insidious urge to fix what ain’t broke has arisen. I’ll probably follow the official documentation, unless someone has a better suggestion.
I’m not running anything unusual and I haven’t done much, if any, “customization”. I update packages maybe a couple of times a week, so they’re current.
Should I go ahead and put myself through this now, or wait until support is dropped and I’m forced?
My desktop is on its third major version upgrade. I don’t pay attention to breaking changes, and somehow I’ve still been made aware of the few packages that require something. Those packages usually include some kind of easy step by step or a script to migrate.
It’s really quite a breeze to upgrade Debian.
On a normal setup without leads or crazy customisation, it’ll be a breeze 👍
Do you run all your services in docker? If yes, the upgrade should be nothing more than the upgrade including switching the docker repo to the new version codename and rebooting
The official docs have everything, though not as well ordered and concise as they could be.
I’ve taken my server from 11 to 12 to 13. Only issue was 11->12 where backports caused some issue that I no longer remember the specifics of (never broke SSH link), so I just don’t fuck with backports anymore. You need to have your shit together for backports, from what I’ve gathered.
12->13 was abs smooth as butter. Extra 3rd party repos weren’t even an issue. One I had to leave “bookworm” because they didn’t have trixie entries; I found it had no trixie entry by looking at the repo itself - it just kept working no problem after the upgrade anyway.
And I have a “stretch” repo I took from 12 to 13 on another server (it’s mongoDB 4.4 for unifi, an abs shitshow of software those bozos cook up)Anyway tldr docs are good narry a problem will occur.
I recently upgraded my gaming pc from Bookworm to Trixie. It was fairly painless. Had to fiddle with some third party repos, but I anticipated that and read up on them beforehand.
I’ll probably follow the official documentation
I just apt update, apt upgrade, modify my apt sources to point at the new distro, repeat. If something breaks, I’ll go fix it.
I wouldn’t anticipate problems, though.
Backup your data: the stuff you can’t just reconstruct.
The go for it. Worst comes to worst: reconstruct the system and applications and reimport the data.
If you have capacity: do it in a VM first.
0.076
Update when you can afford downtime. The update should be painless but you know how it is: things go crazy when they shouldn’t. Every time.
The upgrade itself is never a problem.
The real problem is when your server is running an old software that breaks after the update.
For example I had an old php/drupal site and it broke after upgrading debian because the upgrade also updated php to a newer version that is not supported by that old version of drupal.
This is where docker becomes a godsend
I’ve done it twice so far (main server and a Raspberry Pi). Although I recall I had some package breakage with the main server (some changes in Podman that did not go well with the migration to pasta, the new rootless network stack), the process was mostly pain free and I could fix things remotely with SSH.
I’ve found that dist upgrades themselves are fine, but it usually breaks something. Last time it was my janky WordPress installation which was using PHP 7.4. The wordpress version was up to date but it wouldn’t use the installed 8.2 php and just broke. In the end I installed a fresh wordpress and copied the data over.
The trick is to get wordpress from debian’s repos itself. That way your wordpress is managed by debian and receives automatic security updates.
This is why I’ve started running most services as containers inside of an LXC container in Proxmox
I migrated from Ubuntu to Debian, but my workloads were containerized. Went smoothly. But I had backups.
The fewer packages you have installed, the easier it is to upgrade. So if your stuff is containerized, upgrade should be mostly painless.
In my history at least, dist-upgrades have never themselves been a problem, not even when doing such things as a x86-to-x64 crossgrade upgrade (from Stretch to Buster, back in the time). The problem usually comes right after, with the first reboot, when something does not generate correctly in Grub or the new kernel’s initramfs is lacking a specific module, or a given mariadb flag you were counting on is no longer added by default, or somesuch. So always have a rescue boot ready.
Is it painful? I’ve upgraded several versions without difficulty. “third party” repositories are problematic so be sure you follow the guidelines about disabling them.
