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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?

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    May I be the first to comment: "It depends..."? ;)
    – MadMike
    Commented Aug 21, 2017 at 7:02
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    Debian / Raspbian is the distro with the most conservative update regime. This is reflected in the version freeze of each release which is designated "stable".
    – flakeshake
    Commented Aug 21, 2017 at 10:56
  • Yes, they are. I agree with both comments. Myself, I am going to wait until I can do a fresh NOOBS install of it, then try it out.
    – SDsolar
    Commented Aug 22, 2017 at 1:34

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Basically, it is safe and generally unless you want a feature in stretch you don't need to upgrade. All Linux distros are usually really stable upon release due to testing although there is not much of a reason to upgrade unless you are having problems with your os at the moment.

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  • I have assumed pretty much that was the case. So when it is released as a NOOBS it will go on one of my underutilized Rpi3's. My working units are tuned and stable. Jessie has turned out to be very reliable for 24x7 operation.
    – SDsolar
    Commented Aug 27, 2017 at 2:10

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