Linux Mint’s New Upgrade Tool Enters Public Beta Testing, Here’s How to Use It

Linux Mint’s new upgrade tool is now available for public beta testing and you can use it right now to upgrade LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) 4 installations to the LMDE 5 release.

The new upgrade tool was announced earlier this month and it’s designed as a major upgrade to the current upgrade tool to make things significantly easier for newcomers who want to upgrade their current Linux Mint or Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) installations to a major release.

The new Linux Mint upgrade tool it’s fully configurable and comes with features like a fully graphical upgrade experience, performs more checks to ensure the upgrade process will go smoothly in different scenarios, it’s localized in various languages, preserves the user’s choice of mirrors and doesn’t force you to remove your custom repositories or PPAs, and warns you about orphaned packages, but lets you keep them.

As of today, Linux Mint’s new upgrade tool is available for public beta testing, as announced by project leader Clement Lefebvre. As mentioned before, right now it can only be used to upgrade LMDE 4 installations to LMDE 5, but the final release will let you also upgrade Linux Mint 20.3 installations to Linux Mint 21.

Therefore, if you want to give it a try and you have a Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 installation, you can install the new upgrade tool by running the commands below in the Terminal app.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mintupgrade

Once it’s installed, you must run it from the command line as well with the sudo mintupgrade command. Don’t worry, you will have a full graphical upgrade experience while the magic happens in the background. From the Preferences, you’ll be able to disable force checking of system snapshots, system update state, supported Linux Mint version, and orphan packages, which can be managed from the same place.

Here’s a screenshot tour of a full LMDE 4 to LMDE 5 upgrade.

Once the upgrade process is finished, you will have to uninstall the upgrade tool by running the sudo apt remove mintupgrade command and then reboot your computer. If you encounter any issues during the upgrade process or you just want to give feedback to the Linux Mint devs about the new upgrade tool, do it here.

Last updated 2 years ago