Can I do an inplace upgrade to Trixie or do I have to start from scratch with a new Trixie image? According to AI, an inplace upgrade can be done – but I never know if AI is correct. Has anyone done the upgrade this way?
Thanks.
The official upstream answer is “no”:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/os.html#os-installation
If you’re running a previous version of Raspberry Pi OS and want to use the latest major version, don’t perform an in-place update (updating the current system without reinstalling). Instead, start again by installing a new image of Raspberry Pi OS.
That said, it’s surely technically possible given enough effort - just not officially supported and will be a rocky road. You’d need to familiarize yourself with exactly what has changed between your current version and trixie as a starting point (both in upstream Debian, and in the Pi OS specific additions). This is not trivial.
We don’t test cross-distro-version upgrades of the piaware packages so there may be problems in that path too.
I’d re-image unless you have a lot of customization that’s hard to reproduce. (if you do have a lot of customization, I hope you have good backups!)
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For the sake of clarity, maybe the subject should be edited to read “Raspberry Pi OS Trixie”? Debian itself supports in place upgrades per their documentation. I upgraded in place my feeder running Debian Bookworm last week with no issues. But Pi OS and upstream Debian have their differences and folks need to know that before diving into the pool.
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When RPi OS trixie was newly released, I attempted in-place upgrade from bookworm to trixie on my RPi 4. The upgrade ran countinously for more than one hour, till I got fedup and killed the upgrade process.
Then I re-imaged the microSD card with trixie, which took less than 10 minutes.
Building & Installing dump1090-fa, dump978-fa, piaware, piaware-web took less than half an hour, and installing fr24feed, rbfeeder, pfclient, graphs1090, took another 15 minutes.
At the end I had everything latest and fresh. 
Ok, it looks like the consensus is – start from scratch, don’t do an inplace upgrade.
Thanks.
Good point, I changed the subject line.