Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

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Antonio Nero
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Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by Antonio Nero »

I always upgraded Mint by the Mint Upgrade Tool.

This upgrade went differently from the previous ones. All the others were smoother, this asked to remove practically every program I've installed, even Audacious and Audacity, just to mention two of them. Moreover, when I started the environment, the pointer worked but left and right clicks don't. That forced me to come back to the previous version by Timeshift with some problem due for the useless touchpad.

As I said before, I've accepted my programs removal, was not an issue reinstall them, but adding this with the useless touchpad and some wifi problems convinced me that this is an uncomfortable issue for an OS intended to be simple for newcomers, even though I'm not anymore but I like simplicity. Maybe is good with a fresh installation (I'll try it in the future) but I would prefer an easy upgrade.
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by manyroads »

FWIW.... sometime you might consider providing detailed specifics regarding the actual failings, errors and/or omssions so that help might be forth coming.... logs are also useful.
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by antikythera »

Where the upgrade goes belly up is when you have a plethora of PPA added to deliver custom kernels or driver builds to force your system to behave a certain way with Mint 20.X usually. Also due diligence of reading the Mint 21 release notes and known issues PLUS the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release notes and known issues is 100% necessary. That reading will not only inform you of any showstoppers that might save you wasting time upgrading your system but also how to mitigate a lot of them if solutions are already known.
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by motoryzen »

this asked to remove practically every program I've installed, even Audacious and Audacity, just to mention two of them.
hmmm. That has me curious . Joe Collins did a short video within around 3 weeks ago claiming " The mint team knocked this one out of the park" claiming the upgrade experience to Mint 21 was excellent..and if I recall correctly he also uses Audacious and Audacity as he has been working with audio files for many years now.

Perhaps maybe picking his brain to see if he did anything differently? (shrugs)
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Antonio Nero
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by Antonio Nero »

I'm just sharing my experience, I'm glad others haven't the same negative issue. As I said before, previous upgrades were flawless.

Since I'm not a programmer or a nerd I just followed the basics of upgrade, the same basics adopted in the previous upgrades. For the same reason I didn't thought to record the logs of the errors you're asking me.
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Pierre
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by Pierre »

the Mint Upgrade Program,
- should be based upon an minimum version of the LinuxMint System.

thus, if you do have an number of added extras, then that alone will complicate the process.

this is why, any number of forum.members will usually advise,
to perform an clean Installation of any Operating System.
- this will also apply to that Windows System, too.

it just keeps the error rate down, somewhat better.
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Antonio Nero
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by Antonio Nero »

Pierre wrote: Wed Sep 07, 2022 11:34 pm the Mint Upgrade Program,
- should be based upon an minimum version of the LinuxMint System.

this is why, any number of forum.members will usually advise,
to perform an clean Installation of any Operating System.

it just keeps the error rate down, somewhat better.
Yes, I'll do a clean installation in the future (as soon as possible).

If others didn't find problems, I keep in account mine could be a personal issue. For coincidence, recently on GitHub I'd encountered a crash using Godot 4.0 alpha, but a user told me it works perfectly on Linux Mint Xfce, so this reinforces me it could be me.
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by fstjohn »

I used Aptik (the paid version) and Baqpaq (also paid) to do the upgrade to 21 from 20.3 (Cinnamon). Virtually problem free and only had to reinstall a few programs. I preceded the operation with a fresh Foxclone backup just in case, but didn't have to use it.

My procedure. All backups to external USB HD:
1) Fresh Aptik backup (excluding home data)
2) Fresh Baqpaq backup of home
3) Fresh Timeshift backup (insurance, maybe overkill but WTH)
4) Fresh Foxclone backup (insurance policy to revert to 20.3 in case of disaster)
5) Disconnect any external drives you don't want overwritten (insurance against screwups).
6) Do a clean install of Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.
7) Reconnect external drives.
8 ) Install all updates from update manager & reboot as/if required
9) Restore Aptik backup
10) Restore Baqpaq backup
11) Re-install anything that wasn't restored automatically.
12) Once everything seems OK, run a Foxclone backup against the new 21 system (but don't delete the 20.3 backup)
13) Run an Aptik backup against the new 21 system.
14) Set up Timeshift and Baqpak scheduling & do initial backups. Label the new backups with "Mint 21 initial backup" but don't delete the old backups; you can delete them after everything settles down.

I think I included everything, but correct me if I'm wrong. Worked for me, but of course YMMV.
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by terry_dwyer »

I have aptik but I use Kbackup for my home directory. How is baqpaq better, no criticism, I'd just like to know because I'm looking at a clean install of mint 21 over 20.3 which works perfectly on my current laptop and I don't want to have the problems other people are reporting. Is Kbackup available in Mint 21
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by fstjohn »

terry_dwyer wrote: Fri Sep 09, 2022 5:26 am I have aptik but I use Kbackup for my home directory. How is baqpaq better, no criticism, I'd just like to know because I'm looking at a clean install of mint 21 over 20.3 which works perfectly on my current laptop and I don't want to have the problems other people are reporting. Is Kbackup available in Mint 21
I've got no experience with Kbackup. I like Baqpaq because it allows mounting backups as a drive and simply copy any or all files to the original or new location. It uses Borg to store data very efficiently. Here's a link to the user manual. https://docs.teejeetech.com/baqpaq/page ... l#overview
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by terry_dwyer »

Thanks for the info. I'll have a look
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by rickNS »

terry_dwyer wrote: Fri Sep 09, 2022 5:26 am Is Kbackup available in Mint 21
Kbackup is indeed available in Mint 21.
But, requires some 86 additional packages to be installed, and that is why I always avoid any KDE apps, it really makes no sense as there are "alternatives".
As always though, your choice.

Code: Select all

rick@t420:~$ apt install -s kbackup
[sudo] password for rick:   
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  ****long list of packages removed here****
0 upgraded, 86 newly installed, 0 to remove and 184 not upgraded.
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by terry_dwyer »

Yes that's why I was asking about baqpaq. I'd like to get away from Kbackup if possible
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by fstjohn »

terry_dwyer wrote: Mon Sep 12, 2022 9:24 pm Yes that's why I was asking about baqpaq. I'd like to get away from Kbackup if possible
Tony George, the author of Baqpaq also wrote Timeshift and many other excellent utilities for Linux. Tony lives in India. I don't know if he's a native or expatriate, but I do know he writes some excellent stuff. His tech support, which he answers personally, is excellent and he replies quickly. The combination of Timeshift and Baqpaq for system and data backups, respectively, is hard to beat. Aptik, which Tony also wrote, is specifically designed to transition between Linux versions, I.E. between Mint 20.3 and 21 for instance.
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by MikeNovember »

Hi,

Some tricks to correctly use mintupgrade:

0) If you use 5.4.x kernel in Mint 20.3, and whatever the way you will install Linux Mint 21 (update=fresh installation or upgrade=mintupgrade), test that your hardware is compatible with the new 5.15.x kernel and the new hardware stack: boot on Linux Mint 21 live USB or DVD and check all is OK (you can compare two system reports, inxi outputs, one got with installed Mint 20.3 and one got with live Mint21). This maybe a stopper.

1) At first: BACKUP (system: Foxclone or equivalent; system snapshot: Timeshift; home files: FreeFileSync).

2) In Update Manager (Edition / Software Sources) remove your PPAs or additional repos; the packages you installed from those now appear in the "obsolete or manually installed" category.

3) In Update Manager (Edition / Software Sources / Maintenance) click on "Downgrade the foreign packages to a lower version"; if a version of a foreign package exist in the repositories, it will replace the one installed.

4) Open a terminal; type the following command, it will list the remaining foreign or manually installed packages:

Code: Select all

apt list ?obsolete
You can directly have this list in a text file:

Code: Select all

apt list ?obsolete >list.txt
5) Now open Synaptic. You can uninstall or keep the remaining foreign packages:
* uninstall the ones that will not work on Mint 21 / Ubuntu 22.04;
* keep the ones that will work with Mint 21 (as an example, you can keep LibreOffice Community debs as downloaded from LO website, since they are Linux Mint / Ubuntu "version independent"), remove them from your "list.txt".
NB: if you want to remove all the foreign packages at once, use Update Manager (Edition / Software Sources / Maintenance), click on "Remove foreign packages" button.

You can now use mintupgrade!

After the upgrade:

6) Install the PPAs and additional repositories (the ones you had removed) and update your system.

7) Manually install the packages that are still on your "list.txt".

Eight) Check that all is OK.

9) Make new system backup and system snapshot.

Regards,

MN

PS1: the use of flatpaks or AppImages minimize the impact of an upgrade and the number of applications to reinstall.

PS2: mintupgrade is a bit more sophisticated than the way Ubuntu upgrades are done: change of the packages sources for the upgrade target ones and perform a "dist-upgrade" (I let you find how to do it). It sometimes works. :mrgreen:
Last edited by MikeNovember on Sun Oct 02, 2022 4:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by Pjotr »

Don't bother. Always do a fresh clean installation of Mint, at the start of a new series (like the current 21 series). In-place upgrading is only advisable within a Mint series (e.g. from 20.2 to 20.3).

The reason is simple: a new Mint series means an entirely new underlying Ubuntu code base. That jump in Ubuntu code base, is only too often too big for a flawless in-place upgrade.
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Antonio Nero
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by Antonio Nero »

Pjotr wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2022 2:32 pm Don't bother. Always do a fresh clean installation of Mint, at the start of a new series (like the current 21 series). In-place upgrading is only advisable within a Mint series (e.g. from 20.2 to 20.3).

The reason is simple: a new Mint series means an entirely new underlying Ubuntu code base. That jump in Ubuntu code base, is only too often too big for a flawless in-place upgrade.
I agree.

Just to try something new, I will follow MikeNovember's tips. but I'm sure I need a fresh installation. As far as I remember, I think previous updates were all right because I updated within a Mint series as you said.
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Re: Installation of Mint 21, the worst one

Post by rossdv8 »

This upgrade went differently from the previous ones. All the others were smoother, this asked to remove practically every program I've installed, even Audacious and Audacity, just to mention two of them.
Same here (I was upgrading from Mint 20.3). So by the time I realised I had consented to removing just about ALL my installed software, which was just after I clicked to continue, I thought what the hell - I'll let it go and do a complete reinstall afterwards.

As it turned out though, it seems to have deleted all these programs, except a few of the odd PPAs I had installed, and replaced them with the new improved version.
It also seems to have replaced most of the odd PPAs with the new improved version. I manually added the rest.
So THAT was a nice surprise after the scary message and seeing it delete so much stuff!
I'm just sharing my experience, I'm glad others haven't the same negative issue. As I said before, previous upgrades were flawless.
I have also noticed a few little problems or 'things that are different' although I'm not sure if some are features, rather than problems.
Losing my Right Click desktop menu is one that I had not noticed until I read this post. In my case, using Mint Xfce, I suspect it could be something to do with a Thunar setting or something in Compiz.

If you are using Cinnamon or Mate - it might be a Mint thing.
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