Hello everyone,
I’m currently in the process of installing KiCad 8.0 on my machine, which already has KiCad 7.0 installed. During the installation, I noticed that both versions seem to be co-existing rather than KiCad 8.0 upgrading the previous version.
I’m wondering if it’s safe to uninstall the previous version of KiCad, considering that the new version seems to be running alongside it without any issues.
Any advice or insights on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
One thing to remember is that once you have migrated a project you cannot use the files with an older (major) version. So if you think you may need to backtrack with a backup of the project then you could keep 7 around.
Otherwise if you have no old projects or you are willing to plunge in you might as well go all in with 8.
When I will decide to move to V8 I will uninstall V7 and then install V8.
Configurations of V7 and V8 are saved in separate folders so not relate to each other. Also when uninstalling V7 its configuration is not uninstalled so can be used as initial when running V8 for the first time (I suppose there can be some questions asked by program at first run).
I’m using only my own libraries and I don’t know how with default libraries. Isn’t it so that V7 project opened with V8 is in any way attached to V7 libraries so after uninstalling V7 will be attached to not existing libraries. Used symbols and footprints are saved in schematic and pcb files but how it behaves when you select 'Update Symbols/Footprints from Library" I don’t know. I run these functions very often as costs only few seconds and I have all symbols/footprints in acoordance with libraries. If I were using default libraries I would check how it behaves before uninstalling V7 (you always can install it back 
).