Upgrade to Mint Debian - will I lose my programs?

[aplany]

This is a complete newbie question, but if I upgrade to the new Mint Debian from v12 will I lose all of the programs I have installed? Some of them were a bit of a pain to install. Also, will I lose my data? Do I need to back it up? I am not sure if it is basically a brand new install or an upgrade.

Thanks for your help.

[tdockery97]

It is not possible to upgrade from Mint 12 to Mint Debian. They are two entirely different systems. Mint 12 is based on Ubuntu. Moving to Mint Debian would require a fresh install.

[Oscar799]

Moved here by moderator

[drdavidk]

So, yes, you would lose your programs if you installed LMDE instead of LM 12. You can upgrade to LM 13 from 12 without losing programs.

As for your data: you can back up any data in your /home directory, and/or create a separate partition for all your data and not install LM or LMDE to it. Like many others, I have a partition for /root, one for /home, and a third for all my data. Whenever I install a new distribution, it by definition overwrites anything in /root, while you get usually instruct the installer to not reformat/overwrite /home (should you choose). There are times when reformatting/overwriting is a good idea, especially across different distributions, so it's best to save all data in a third partition, and leave /home for personal settings and configuration files.

Hope this helps.

[killer de bug]

Aplany,

Due to the question you're asking, I suggest you don't upgrade to LMDE. The debian edition is not very difficult to use but it's still harder than the main one. Your question shows that you don't have the level of knowledge to use it without any problem.

Upgrade to Mint 13 seems a better choice (a safer one for you)