Is it possible to perform an upgrade without losing my customizations, settings, software etc.?
 

Hi, is it possible to perform an upgrade (of Mint -e.g. 16, 17 or 18 upgraded to 19) without losing my customizations, settings, software etc. which I've worked hard on over the years to get 'my' mint the way I want it?

Put another way, is it possible to keep my system as close to how it was before the upgrade? Obviously, some things will have to change such as if a feature is removed or changed but is there a way to mostly keep things intact so that I can go on working the way I did before the upgrade?

And is there any difference to an upgrade versus a complete wipe-and-reinstall? Obviously, if I wipe/format and reinstall I will lose my settings, customisations, installed software etc.?

If I do as much as possible within my user directory and back up said user directory and (after the upgrade) restore my user directory would that help? I'd still lose my installed software correct? But I could possibly write a script to re-install my software again after an upgrade? -But then I'd still lose any customisations made to that software?

Any other suggestions? Possibly I could look at another distro etc.? Or is there possibly software which could help me with this?

Hope the above makes sense? Thank you for your time!

(I do rolling releases (mostly)) but, you an backup your home configs and hidden files and any configs on your system side that you modified, anything to do with your modifications. upgrade then take it from there.

what changes take place you might have to just put some time in getting them back to where you wanted them, or maybe see some changes as a nice thing and keep them instead.

I'd think the upgrade would be mostly just version updates to get to you a latest version of kernel, and installed software. what changes as before, your config files maybe over written, so if you have a backup of them, it should save you time in having to remember what you did to them to put them the way you liked, but backup the new ones, and copy over the config files with your back up of the old ones.

if anything fails you have your original (upgrade configs) to fall back on to restore it.

Clem used to have a philosophical objection to "upgrades", but has changed his stance of late (last couple of years). The Mint upgrades (17->18->19) seemed to have worked ok.
You can also keep your customisations even with a "wipe-and-reinstall" if (and only if) you have a separate /home partition and take care not to re-format it during the (re-)install. Will require package reinstalls for manually selected packages, but is easily managed.
You can easily move to a separate /home partition prior to an upgrade in need - plenty of tutorials online.

Been there, done it - it works. But note my sigline. You can't have too many backups.

Perform an Upgrade from version x to version x to test this?
 

Is it possible to perform an upgrade from a version to the same version - the reason is to test this?

So let's say I'm already running Mint 19 (and there isn't a Mint 20+ released yet) can I 'upgrade' from 19 to 19. I'd want to do this to test what I'd lose and what I wouldn't lose (able to restore) etc. Or I suppose a better test would be for me install version 18 in a VM, customise some things, install software etc. and then upgrade to Mint 19. Again the objective would be for me to test this out and improve my ability to restore/upgrade smoothly

I realise that this is a Mint forum but could another distro be better suited to smooth upgrades? - my definition of smooth = less time/work required from me to restore things (as much as possible) to how they were? Possibly Ubuntu or Fedora etc.? Or maybe even Debian? Or the Debian version of Mint (as opposed to the Ubuntu version of Mint) etc.?

Read the section on system snapshots in the install guide.

Mint is as good as any IMHO.

Apologies for my ignorance but why would I want to move to a separate /home partition prior to the upgrade? Is that so the 'original' /home partition (with the valuable data in it) is unlinked (for want of a better word) and the new (less important /home partition is 'linked') during the upgrade?

Thanks

separate home and / root partitions on your install. This keeps you separated for any re-installs, and such. During that process you would only need to point to it as a mount point without formatting your /home partition, this keeps all of your stuff so you can still have your customizations intact that reside in your home user.

If you did not create a separate / root and /home during that installation, it still be obtained by creating a separate partition then moving your /home over onto it, change you fstab and remount while in root login or via an live use linux session with root privs. rsync or cp with the proper flags will do the trick.

if you do not have that, then you loose everything upon re-installing your system.

That was my biggest grumblings with Mint. I held on as long as I could, it was, well ridiculous, to reinstall your OS for each upgrade. Even Windows could do that.

Although I haven't used Mint since 17.x - happy with debian buster 10 - I had always found Mint to be excellent. They polish things up great, weather Cinnamon or Mate (my choice) it is extremely user-friendly. You can learn as much about linux you want... or don't really have to concern yourself with much of it.

I had found a tip about separating ~/ directories. Use a separate parathion and create links for ones with personal files ie) That way if configuration files need updated they're available for the system. And your files in ~/Music ~/Documents ~/Pictures and others don't need shuffled around. This is just an overview, I had a shell script to create directories, rm the ones in $HOME and create the links.