I upgraded one of my computers from 11.2 to 11.3. Most things were conserved, but I had downloaded specific wifi and printer drivers that were sacrificed and now require several hours of work to replace.
Updates are like that. IMO it is usually better and easier to install fresh. There is is too much left behind that may break the new OS. Really this is true of all OS’s. If you have a vanilla install without anything unusual added then an upgrade may work ok. But yo install foreign binaries or do custom configurations and thing will break and it an be a bear to fix.
Indeed I also find that the case, and I always do a fresh install.
The updated wireless driver and the slightly improved opensource radeon driver in openSUSE-11.3 work better in my Dell Studio 1537 laptop (with Intel 5300AGN wireless and ATI HD3450 graphics) based on testing from the liveCD, yet I have not installed 11.3 on this laptop because I have a business meeting in a week, and I don’t want to risk anything in my laptop’s setup. Instead I plan to wait until early August AFTER I return from my business meeting, and only then replace 11.2 with 11.3 in this laptop.
Typically that sort of delay/consideration is something I always consider/encounter when looking at an openSUSE ‘update’. I find a little conservatism always helps, and goes a long way in improving my Linux experience.
One very nice thing about Linux, is that one can often keep one’s original /home and thus retain all of one’s custom configuration information, that comes into use after one has re-installed all the associated applications.