On Mon, 29 Jun 2009, Adriano Trentini wrote:
Hi. I'm not professional. I have Lenny installed in a AMD Duron. Why to upgrade etch if you can simply install Lenny?
Because it is easier to upgrade than to reinstall in most cases. Usually the machine's configuration is not affected during the upgrade and usually upgrades go pretty smoothly. Usually one can upgrade them remotely, if one has a lot of machines that they control. This can save a ton of time. Sometimes there are some hiccups with upgrades, but my experience (going back to about 1997) is really good. This was a feature of Debian that was ahead of nearly all other Linux distributions for a long time. It was common for people using other distributions to put off upgrading simply because it was a reinstall (which wasn't as easy as it is now). Debian people would just laugh at that.
I remember when Debian was a little more work to install than some other distributions and my colleagues at work kept wondering why I insisted on using Debian. I would always say because I only had to install Debian once and not every time a new version was released (although there where a lot of other reasons too). Installs now days are pretty easy, but it wasn't always that way.