I tried to correct that, the folders and contents copied to the relevant directories manually from another OS.

But that hack didn't work for me.

I had installed usrmerge before-hand in preparation but it never finished the install scripts, after --reconfig (dpkg --configure -a) a few times.

I don't know why, but I have read somewhere that usrmerge has problems with separate harddrive partitions for /usr. I generally have separate partitions for /, /boot, /usr, /tmp, /var, swap and /home

So I did a quick backup of /root and /etc and started a clean install.

I had to install seatd to get a login screen

I run kde, and found sddm virtual keyboard fullscreen... I'm using slim to keep the login screen neat looking

I wish there was an "accessabillity" toggle switch/meta package we could switch off all the brail, virtual keyboards and speaking tools from the install process.

But other than those 2 things, My system is running quite nicely, thank you for your efforts.

I installed Debian in June 2004

I started with Woody in July of 2002 Google tells me for the release, or somewhere close to that as it was the first I used. It has been my experience in these past couple of decades that upgrading using the tools provided by Debian just works. Though now the dist-upgrade has been replaced by the full-upgrade which still does the same terrific job.

I started around the same time too (redhat 5.1) and I tried to do an upgrade once around that time and it didn't go well at all. Of course, times have changed and dist-upgrades have been smooth sailing for the most part for the last 10 years. I keep house pretty well,

I started with 5.2 in June of 1999 just over twenty-six years ago. Win98SE "upgrade" left my SB AWE64 sound card only able to play MIDI files, was in the store to buy new and seen the Redhat there dirt cheap and said what the hell and gave it shot. Installed ran sndconfig and had sound that was the last for windows as a daily driver. No wonder you had problems with upgrading system at that time you were in rpm hell as it was called. Where you had to dance naked in the moonlight chanting the secret formula while sacrificing a chicken or goat to get the damn things to install. What a nightmare that junk was.

The Mandrake based on it I found soon after that at least had sensible install procedures but nothing like the Debian Woody and apt had once I moved to it in 2004 I think it was it came out. Now that has been nothing but a real pleasure in the twenty plus years I have used it. But then again I am sensible with my machines I learned way back then backups, backups and more backups. They save your ass if anything goes wrong to this very day before any major upgrade I run my backup script on my machine to clone it to an external ssd boot that on my duplicate spare machine do the upgrade and see how it goes. I cannot remember the last time I had problems with an upgrade/dist-upgrade.

BTW: Having started in the mid 90ies with linux I have never done upgrades to
a new release, always did fresh installs and adapted them to local
requirements. It really make for a lot of decluttering, especially for people
that can't house keep or are hoarders.

I started around the same time too (redhat 5.1) and I tried to do an upgrade once around that time and it didn't go well at all. Of course, times have changed and dist-upgrades have been smooth sailing for the most part for the last 10 years. I keep house pretty well, but I don't mind a little cruft as long as things keep working. I do have email archives back to 2002, but it's all in text and only takes up 4.8GB. Still using alpine (fka pine) as my main mail client and it works beautifully.

I appreciate the discussion in this thread, and I'll probably go with the dist-upgrade and do a reinstall if anything goes badly. I do have a nightly rsync of my home folder to another disk, so I'll likely do one more and make some notes before doing the upgrade (and of course reading the release notes).

Run

sudo refractainstaller

in a terminal to run the cli installer.

but it seems refractainstaller is not yet ready for excalibur

@Devarch: I've been using it in excalibur. What problem are you having? (maybe it should be in another thread).

I want to use tune2fs to tune an encrypted ext4 home partition that was created by refractainstaller. Can I decrypt the partition without mounting it? If so, how would I do that?

cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n...  and you can tune2fs your ext4, or what do you mean?

I don't think I understand the question. If you have another linux installed on the system, it won't be able to see the filesystem on the encrypted partition until it's decrypted.

I want to use tune2fs to tune an encrypted ext4 home partition that was created by refractainstaller. Can I decrypt the partition without mounting it? If so, how would I do that?

but it seems refractainstaller is not yet ready for excalibur

I'll be rolling over all my stuff I think, too much work to build a freshie with all the custom settings and crap I have.