Upgrade to Mint 19: Upgrade or Fresh Install?

[buster]

So I read the glowing reports in the Mint forums about how well the upgrades went. So I upgraded my virtual Cinnamon Mint 18.3 to 19.


#1. First I did a Timeshift backup. (Don't tell Jason but I did it on the same drive as everything else.) This took an inordinate amount of time. But it was worth it in the end.

#2. The instructions given make a lot of use of the command line, which is fine for us, but much of the stuff would be foreign to less knowledgeable users. AND....partway through the process I saw there was an update available in the update notice, which showed after the sources for programs had been changed using the command line. After awhile I clicked it and it said 'mintupgrade'. I should have just clicked it. Feel it would have been much simpler.

#3. The hours drifted by, partly I suspect because it's a virtual distro. But it did finish.

#4. Probably because I didn't add in some sources using the command line, when all was said and done, I had a working machine but my themes were gone, and a couple of programs.

#5. I used Timeshift after a while to go back  to 18.3, which felt very comfortable.

#6. Too time consuming, too detailed, too boring to do this way. If you have all your data, a new install can be done in say 20 minutes? Get the programs you want in a few minutes. Get themes etc in 20 minutes. Move in bookmarks and email addresses.

So I might work on it some day it's raining and I've got nothing better to do. All praise Timeshift.

[ssfc72]

I haven't seen anything in my Mint 18 Update menu, to upgrade to Mint 19, yet!

My Mint 18.3 Cinnamon has been giving me issues, just lately, so I have transferred all my Mint 18 programs that I installed and used, to a usb portable drive.
I will do a clean install of Mint 19 on my HP notebook.

The issues I have had were crashing of the Cinnamon desktop when streaming video on YouTube.
I also had an issue with an Opera browser upgrade, through the Update Manager that wiped out a lot of my Opera settings that I had configured and I lost all my Extensions, Bookmarks, Toolbar, etc.
I was able to restore most of the Opera bookmarks by re-syncing my Opera to my Opera account.

Very strange things going on with my Mint 18.3!

Update!  The Mint Update finally showed up in the Mint Update Manager, today July 7.  However, after running the update, I was still at Mint 18.3???

[Jason]

I"m surprised you had to use terminal commands but it's good for you to learn stuff like that, Buster :-) In the past, it's usually just meant upgrading the Update Manager (usually you see an update for it as you saw), then once you do that the option to upgrade to 19 will be available in a drop down menu in Update Manager. Since I'm using KDE, I opted to try Kubuntu 18.04 instead. So far it's been working fine but only had it for about a week.


So Timeshift wasn't that hard after all, Buster? The first snapshot always takes a while, after that they're fairly quick unless you have massive system changes (like after an upgrade).

[buster]

Here's the upgrade as explained by Clem:

https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2416

[ssfc72]

I did a clean install of Mint 19 on my HP notebook (Mint 18.3 was on it, previously).

I would recommend waiting for a few months, before moving to Mint 19. There seems to be a number of issues being reported and I have been having difficulty with it, myself.

After the install, when I booted up the dual boot notebook, it took me to a basically empty screen with a command line that began with the word grub.  That was all!
I had to type in exit, to get back to a screen that had some boot options.  I had to select the "notebook hard drive" to get a screen menu, that gave me the option of booting "Ubuntu".  I might be able to fix this with my Super Grub repair program, but my first go at using the repair program did not give me a proper Grub boot menu.
On my Mint 18.3 dual boot setup, the hp notebook would automatically boot into Mint, without having to do anything, during the boot process.


Got Mint 19 to boot and tried to install WINE.

After the install, there was no WINE menu item, to boot up into the WINE configuration menu.
From what I googled about this problem, it is being reported by other people and there does not seem to be an easy fix to get a WINE menu item to show up.
I tried one fix, but I could not get this fix to work, for me.

Update July 10,  Experienced a Cinnamon crash, while streaming a YouTube video. Same thing was happening on Mint 18.3.  I suspect it may be the Opera browser, that I am using.  I will try using Firefox  , when streaming YouTube video to see if the problem occurs, using it.

Also, I seem to be experiencing a notebook touchpad issue.  It seems that when I tap the touchpad, to click an item, I am not getting a response, all the time. I seem to have to tap the touchpad quite firmly to get a response, every time.
I saw something in the Mint 19 issues, list, that they mention something about installing a Synaptics touchpad driver, if you are having issues with your notebook touchpad.

I think I will be ditching Mint 19 and going back to Mint 18.3.
Mint 19 seems to be having too many issues for me, on my hp notebook.

[fox]

I upgraded Mint 18.3 to 19 today on my office computer; twice actually (different partitions). I used Mint's posted upgrade procedure with the upgrade done from the Terminal. The upgrades took about 45 minutes and both were successful. However, I did notice that my Windows 7 file on another partition wouldn't open from Virtualbox. I'll have to look into it.

[Jason]

Is it on a laptop? Bring it tonight if so.

[fox]

Nope, on my office iMac. However, the problem turned out to be the saved image. When I discarded it and started up, everything was OK.