Here’s how you can upgrade to new Linux Mint versions using the Mint upgrade tool, i.e. mintupgrade GUI with actual upgrade process screenshots.
If you are looking for detailed upgrade steps to the recently released Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” and 21.1 “Vera”, read this guide 👉 Upgrading to Linux Mint 21.0 and 21.1
Table of Contents
Linux Mint Upgrade Tool
The Linux Mint team announced a few months back, that they built a new utility to upgrade the Linux Mint’s significant versions. It’s called the “mintupgrade2”. Development is complete, and It is currently under the support and planning for upgrading to the major versions—for example, Linux Mint 20 to 21 and not the minor version upgrades.
Although you can upgrade the versions using the standard apt commands, the Mint team believes significant version upgrades are tricky. It would be difficult for the new users to perform a seamless upgrade because it involves the terminal and a set of complex steps with commands.
Moreover, the GUI is a wrapper with additional features to the mintupgrade program, which brings a set of pre-system checks and upgrade processes with a one-click Fix.
In addition, the mintupgrade checks basic checks, whether you are connected to power, the system is up to date, disk space availability and many more features.
To show you how it looks and works, we set up a testbed with LMDE 4 and give it a go.
But before that, here’s a quick set of features:
- Entirely GUI-driven upgrade process
- Multi-language support
- Pre-upgrade checks: system backup, power, disk space, list of removed packages
- Configurable
- Alert you about the orphaned packages from the prior version
- It gives you the option to fix issues
How it works
When we ran the mint upgrade utility via the command mintupgrade, the GUI, the friendly welcome screen gives you an excellent starting point and starts the upgrade process. And then, it begins with a series of checks on its own.
In addition to that, when it finds some problem in your system, it stops and gives you sufficient details about it. Once you click on Fix, it can resume the process again.
That’s not all; it can resume the upgrade process if interrupted due to network or internet or any other problem.
The utility found the following errors in our test system during our test and fixed them with just one click.
Lastly, we successfully upgraded a test system from LMDE 4 to LMDE 5.
How to get this upgrade utility
The installation of the utility is easy using the commands below. However, if you are running the latest version of Linux Mint 21, it should already be installed and try by running mintupgrade from the terminal.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mintupgrade
Closing Notes
Finally, I think it’s one of the best utilities by the Linux Mint team. As you can see above, it handled many errors on its own. All I did was click the “Fix” button. And the utility is smart enough to understand all the failure points and take care of the remediations.
