doktor5000 wrote:A fresh installation from scratch, and afterwards selectively restoring your configs and documents back is always the cleanest way, as you say.
But usually most people don't want the cleanest but the quickest / most convenient way.
And then usually later on they spend hours figuring out tricky intermittent issues that could have been easily avoided ...
There is always a decision to make. Will it be quicker/easier to do a clean install and then rebuild the environment? Or to upgrade and then deal with the resulting issues.
For me, almost always it has proven better to upgrade. The last clean install I did (in fact, the only clean install on this workstation in over 20 years, except for the initial install) was when I went from 32 bit to 64 bit. In that case, I had my desktop running with my environment in about 3 hours, but I did not have the entire system up and running for about a week.
In that time, there are two occasions when I have wondered whether or not a clean install might have been better; one upgrade of Mandrake back around 2003, and this most recent upgrade. Even at that, I have about 18 hours overall invested in this most recent upgrade (in three separate attempts), and that is still less than reconfiguring this whole system (even with the help of my existing /etc and /var) would have been.
I also did upgrade a friend's vanilla Mageia 6 system to Mageia 7 totally without incident.
So I guess my recommendation would be to try the update. If it works, great. If not, there is a decision to make: How complicated is your system? How long will it take to reconfigure after a clean install?