Yup, saw this and thought "oh boy, here I go modding Morrowind again..."

Time to download openMW again.

I now upgraded to 0.51.
Encountered no issues, looking good! :-)

If you grab a generic Linux package from our site, then it should see the same config and saves etc. as your system package uses, so you shouldn't even need to back anything up as long as you don't do anything that would overwrite things. OpenMW doesn't do anything like purge settings that don't mean anything in the current version, so sharing one settings.cfg is safe, and you can try a new version and then go back to the old one. The only thing that doesn't work is loading new saves in old versions of the engine, so you'll need to replay anything you did in the new version if you do end up going back.

Thanks for the recommendation, might give it a try (as it should be easy to backup the old setup, I think).

And regarding the bugs: I was always impressed how basically bug free the engine seems to be (not the game that is running on it, but that's a different topic ;-) ).
Honestly, one of the smoothest gaming experiences I've had in my whole life!

We're pretty thorough about stomping out regressions, so unless you're using mods for documented version-specific things (basically just lighting shaders and XML UI mods), we'd recommend almost all users upgrade to every stable release. Given that 0.48 was branched off four years ago (it had a very long RC phase), you'll almost certainly experience fewer bugs if you just grab a random dev build built from a random tip of tree commit.

Sounds great!
Although I just checked: I am still on OpenMW 0.48.
Will most likely update only after finally finishing the main quest in this playthrough (for the first time - yeah!) and before exploring Tamriel Rebuild.
Never change a running system... ;-)

looks like a cool project and all, but nowhere on the website on first inspection, only on the github could i find the following: "OpenMW is an open-source open-world RPG game engine that supports playing Morrowind."...

maybe worth mentioning on top of the website and of every post for those who are not already familiar with the project?

(just 0.000002 cents...)