It has taken a while, but RaspberryPi.org has now announced the official release of Stretch to replace Jessie.
Does this mean everybody should start changing their repos and doing the upgrade?
Myself, I am always opposed to adding or in this case, changing, repos for any reason. The standard plain-vanilla Jessie repos have been time-tested.
This reminds me of when Microsoft released Windows 2.0 after the ridiculous Windows 1.0 release. A lot of people went right out and bought it. (I know, because I was the one selling it to them in my home town). The new number didn't make it any better. In fact, there were even more bugs to work out.
Upgrading to Stretch is not difficult, as per:
RASPBIAN STRETCH HAS ARRIVED FOR RASPBERRY PI
Excerpt:
To upgrade, first modify the files /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list. In both files, change every occurrence of the word ‘jessie’ to ‘stretch’. (Both files will require sudo to edit.)
Then open a terminal window and execute
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade
Answer ‘yes’ to any prompts. There may also be a point at which the install pauses while a page of information is shown on the screen – hold the ‘space’ key to scroll through all of this and then hit ‘q’ to continue.
Finally, if you are not using PulseAudio for anything other than Bluetooth audio, remove it from the image by entering
sudo apt-get -y purge pulseaudio*
The question is in the title. Should we all rush out and do that to our stable systems, even before there is a Stretch NOOBS? Have enough people done this to consider it safe?