Upgrade or Update
 

Mint 21.2 Cinnamon. What are the trade offs between updating 21.2 from update manager or upgrading to 21.3? Just updating 21.2 is not as secure as upgrading to 21.3? Down side of upgrading to 21.3 is that I have to reinstall some things I added from CLI.

When Mint goes to 22 I will have to reconfigure to my liking and reinstall things I added anyway even if I did upgrade to 21.3. Am I right about that?

borgward,

You are trying to make life difficult for yourself.

There is little point in "upgrading" to LM 21.3, IMO.

Just stick with LM 21.2 and then in June/July 2024 when LM 22 arrives, install that.

Having a separate Home partition helps. Preserve that and only format the root partition for LM 22.

You may need to reinstall certain other software, but how hard is that?

I do have separate Home.

The other software can be a pain. I know from experience. I believe I would need to reinstall some of the added software if I upgraded to 3. Right or wrong?

I did run 19 w/out upgrades to .2, .3 w/no problems. Seems like all the upgrades do is to add bells and whistles.

borgward,

You probably would need to reinstall certain programs if you went from LM 21.2 to 21.3. It is just not worth bothering about, IMO.

Just wait until LM 22 arrives is my advice.

In my experience, a successful on-line version upgrade generally has not required me to reinstall programs. This has been my experience with multiple distros, with this proviso:

If programs were installed from the repos, the version upgrade will know about them and should bring them up to date. If they were not installed from the repos, there may well be some post-upgrade maintenance required.

If you want to do an online version upgrade to v. 22, it's probably a good idea to do any intermediate upgrades as well. It's my opinion that a full on-line version upgrade will likely go more smoothly if the system is fully up to date.

Just my two cents.

If I installed 21 with separate home, ran all updates but not upgrades to 21.3, I do not understand how that affects the upgrade to 22. The upgrade to 22 wipes everything in / and installs 22 there or only makes changes to what is already in / ?

If you upgrade to a new version and select not to format a /home partition which already exists, nothing should change on the /home partition. A possible problem is explained in post 5 above. If you install software from 3rd party sources rather than strictly the repositories, your choice and your problem to resolve. You could try commenting out an 3rd party entries which exist in your sources.list. I've only done a full upgrade to a new release once because it took 6 times longer than the average full install in my case. You could do a new install rather than an upgrade and not format the / partition either. I've done this and it resolved the problems I was having with software and it retained all personal directories/files but this was a reinstall of the same release.