I’ve been wondering why Mint doesn’t seem to have an automatic major version upgrade built in? For those that have an opinion, do you agree with not having this? Why/why not?
I’ve been running Mint 21 for over a year now. I started using it not long before Mint 22 came out and have been dragging my feet on upgrading in fear of breaking something and having to reinstall (and losing something in the process). I’m in the process of setting up proper backups so I’ll probably do it after those are set up (or maybe wait until Mint 23).
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I don’t think I’ve ever had a debian major upgrade go well. always easier to reinstall, but the stakes are so low on my own devices
You should be proud of yourself. I’ve never seen dist-upgrade go wrong since woody - and I’ve upgraded quite a few machines. Did you ever bother reading the release notes for a new major version?
I had some friction with Jessie to stretch and a little again from bookworm to Trixie. Nothing I couldn’t solve, but there are still a few edge cases that aren’t handled.
I’m a happy middleground. I’ve had two upgrades blow up on me, out of the tens I’ve done.
One was a usrmerge catch-22. It wouldn’t let me install the package during upgrade, but also wouldn’t let me complete the upgrade without the merger finishing. Ended up reverting the install and running the merge prior to upgrade.
The second failure was just… I have no idea what I did wrong. Some commands stopped working. Then I lost SSH. Then it wouldn’t even boot. I had to do a full reinstall and rebuild. Not happy times.
Overall, it was just enough failure that I routinely run two backups prior to upgrades now. hahaha
Funny that’s how my Slackware upgrades always went, but I’ve had a great experience with Debian every time.
Do you follow the step-by-step docs or just yolo it?
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Interesting. If you’ve used this on Linux, could you share your experience with and thoughts on it?
That would make Mint unstable. That is exactly what unstable means in Linux context. There are debian based rolling-release distros, including Debian Sid. This is one of the reasons people choose Arch, because it’s a rolling release you never have to worry about version.
There’s a good chance you might break stuff by upgrading major version like you fear, and that’s why it doesn’t happen automatically. That being said it should be safe, but good on you to prepare backups.
any upgrade or update can ‘break’ something.
mint does have an upgrade path from one major version to the next. the upgrade tool might not be available immediately upon the release of the next version, but in your case it has been around awhile.
https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/upgrade-to-mint-22.html
backups are, of course, your responsibility, as is any unexpected manual customizations or software added from outside mint repositories.
Another aspect is that re-installing systems every few years prevents them from becoming messy. You can tidy your system up yourself if you know what you do, and keep detailed record of changes, but most people don’t do that.
Upgrades between major versions - since they can be radically different - is generally not an effective feature.
Having said that, conectiva’s apt-rpm could upgrade and downgrade between major versions; and it worked really well!
