distro upgrade improvements (and mintbackup)

[jiu]

Hi everyone, I love using Linux mint, it's my main desktop, thanks Clem for your amazing work. The main thing I like about it is how pain-free and intuitive it is to use.

One issue I have though is the difficulty in upgrading to the next version, and I suspect it's affecting quite a few people. I understand the focus on doing new installations rather than seamless upgrades as Ubuntu advocates, but I think there is a lot of room to make this process easier and more robust. I'd really love to see some improvements in the mintbackup utility to make the process much more seamless (safekeeping of system files, config files etc...) and more robust (error checks etc...). I found that it wasn't working well at all for me, even reinstalling the software that I had installed before wasn't working well, and I had to rummage manually through the list and install some packages which the utility wouldn't install (maybe to do with changes in package names from one version to the next? not sure).

There aren't a whole lot of good graphical backup utilities out there, so there's space for it to become the standard for doing more than just distro upgrades (incremental backups of personal files etc...).

Keep up the good work otherwise, you guys rock!