Apple has released a potential Golden Master (GM) build of OS X Mavericks Server to developers ahead of next Tuesday's media event where the release date of OS X Mavericks is expected to be announced.
Apple has this to say about OS X Mavericks Server on the marketing page for the software:
OS X Server includes a number of innovations that will help the people who use your network as well as the people who manage it. The new features in Xcode Server make it easier than ever for a Mac or iOS development team to create robust, reliable software, thanks to continuous integration, testing, and repository hosting services. Caching Server 2 speeds up the download and delivery of software through the App Store, Mac App Store, and iTunes Store, and it can now cache on your server for faster downloading to iOS 7 devices. And Profile Manager has an array of new management features for iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks that simplify software distribution of apps and books.
9to5Mac says the GM of OS X Mavericks Server comes with a build number of 13S440. It's available from the OS X Developer page. The consumer version of OS X Mavericks reached Golden Master earlier this month.
Top Rated Comments
OS X server isn't it's own OS. Now it's pretty much just an app that you install.
What were your problems? I've updated my Macs effortless to every new release without any problems over the past 10 years.
It also doesn't matter whether it's Linux, FreeBSD or any other operating system, including OS X - upgrades ALWAYS carry long forgotten corpses and outdated, unstable or even incompatible drivers with them and they NEVER run as well as fresh installations. And that assessment is based on 30 years of IT experience, not forum hearsay.
I do this stuff for a living in a global network environment, and whenever I can avoid it, I don't perform and upgrade but make a fresh installation instead. (Router and switch operating systems like Cisco IOS and Mikrotik RouterOS are the only exceptions.)
All that aside, Apple's upgrade process actually works. In my experience as a highly skilled bench technician, I found that every time someone brought in a computer wheret hey'd done the upgrade themselves and it failed, it always came down to a hardware problem--usually either a bad hard drive or bad RAM. The difficulty with making this claim is that there isn't a good hard drive testing program for the MAC (so in forums, people will dispute that they have a bad hard drive because all the Mac tools tell them it's fine); we always had to pull hard drives out and test them on PCs. Obviously, this annoyed the Mac purist in me, so I wrote my own by modifying e2fsprogs' badblocks tool.
The moral of the story is that no, it isn't decidedly better to do a clean install on OS X. Unless you explicitly want to get rid of everything you've already done, you're just making your life harder and wasting your time.
Were they server versions? I've updated non-server versions without issue as well, but the server upgrades have been hit or miss.