Upgrading to LM21.3 Virginia

[Dullard du Jour]

I should of had toast.

This week I borked my Virginia upgrade from last week via various questionable actions. Between a handful of Timeshift restores between Vanessa and Virginia, a few auto updates from the Update Manager and 'vee-ola' , packages began to not work.

I pulled all other drives and used the opportunity to play with the USB Live installer. Had fun with gparted and made a separate partition for root and home. The installation went famously easy and in a few minutes I had a working Virginia. Of course, moving over browser and email stuff was annoying. Been setting up the rest of the desktop to my preferences.

[gittiest personITW]

Unfortunately my upgrade (not a new install) to 21.3 didn't go too well.
On rebooting after going through the fast upgrade process (4 or 5 minutes tops), the taskbar had disappeared. No Mint menu etc.
At least could double click on icons that were on desktop and could rightclick to get into Terminal (to run TS) as keyboard shortcuts didn't seem to work either.
However, a Timeshift restore got me back to 21.2 so all is well that ends well and that is where I will stay for now.

[Jim Shaffer]

I upgraded my laptop a week or so ago with no issues whatsoever.

Today I attempted to upgrade my desktop, and I hit the infamous problem with hopelessly slow download speed at the main Mint repository. Attempted to change repositories (although they were all showing up much slower than they should've, no matter where they were located) only to find that the updater utility ignores it and goes to the main one. In the big Firefox download speed thread in this forum I read that this problem has been known for two years, and is a deliberate choice in case the repositories aren't synced immediately upon release. But the release is two months old, so this seems like a poor decision to force on users.

[SMG]

Attempted to change repositories (although they were all showing up much slower than they should've, no matter where they were located) only to find that the updater utility ignores it and goes to the main one.

While you cannot change repositories (upgrades must be done from the main repositories), those downloading Firefox can change repositories, but many have not.

In the big Firefox download speed thread in this forum I read that this problem has been known for two years, and is a deliberate choice in case the repositories aren't synced immediately upon release. But the release is two months old, so this seems like a poor decision to force on users.

You seem to be confusing two different issues. Those doing Firefox updates most certainly have a choice to switch to local repositories. The fact many have not is not a decision Linux Mint has "forced" on users.

[BG405]

I have just upgraded to Mint Virginia and I must say that I feel terribly cheated. I sat down with beer and pizza, expecting a 3 to 5 hour adventure like I did with Windows and blast it all...the upgrade to Virginia was finished in just a few minutes.

yeah,
I kind of felt that way.

threw in 4 slices of bread for the Toaster, got the butter out, slathered it up good, turned around, and the Upgrade was done

These posts in particular made me laugh and provided a firm reminder of why my avatar was created (I will tame that down a bit for here; forgot it's as large as life on this Forum .. sort of in-your-face. GIMP will come to the rescue).

Upgrade experience? As expected:

Not quite as fast on my ancient Acer D255E but too quick for me to raid the fridge for another beer.

Unlike those horrible days of yore where it took less hours to manually clean and disinfect a customers' Windows-system of its squillions of viruses, trojans and other malware, than it did to try and rescue their important stuff and try to disinfect that & do a clean install, then find & configure all those obscure hardware drivers which the manufacturers decided not to publish openly.
  Manufacturers' names deleted   are you listening?

All in all a pleasant, straightforward transition from 21.2. Apart from my forgetting to clear the crud out of the /boot partition etc. first .. partition sizes will be adjusted accordingly, for its disk upgrade.

My only gripe (with Xfce, at least) is that if you use the GUI tools to do updates, upgrades, installations or whatever, the dang details window closes when complete without giving the opportunity to review and C+P the output somewhere easy to access in case of borkage .. any way to stop that in some way, maybe a future update? .. even if you do a "Select All" it only selects what's shown in that little window, not all of the text.