Re: Linux system upgrade may not be much better
It's dead easy to upgrade/reinstall if you put / and /home on separate partitions to start with.
Indeed. Did that a long time ago. One of the machines I did that on is - TA DAH - a 10 year old Lenovo R61i laptop, currently running Fedora 23 with an XFCE desktop because I prefer it to Gnome. The only enhancement was to add a 2GB RAM card (so 3GB total) which made it noticeably quicker, so its a reasonable development box for C and Java.
Its still using the original disk drive, though its screen, fan and keyboard have been replaced.
Now RedHat have introduced in-situ version upgrades for Fedora, moving from F22 to F23 was no harder than moving my RPi from Raspbian wheezy to jessie, i.e. start the process, wait until its done, then reboot.