Manual upgrade of Mint

Instructions to upgrade Linux distribution Linux Mint manually. Don’t do this.

Step 1) Back up your files

Before you get started with upgrading your system, it’s highly recommended that you backup all your files and folders so that you will be in a safe place should the upgrade fail. Additionally, you can backup and restore the entire system using the / / ↗ TimeShift utility ↗ . Once you have backed up all your files, you can safely proceed to upgrade your system.

Step 2) Edit the Repository Lists File

The next step is to modify the official package repositories list file which, by default, contains the entries shown below:

You need to replace ‘*tricia‘* with ‘*ulyana‘* and all instances of ‘*bionic‘* with ‘*focal‘*.

To achieve this, edit the file with your preferred text editor as shown

$ sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list

This is what you should have now.

Save and exit the file.

Step 3) Update & Upgrade the system

For the system to sync with and use the new repository an update of the package lists is required. Additionally, you need to upgrade the entire system’s packages to their latest versions. This can be achieved by running two commands in one line as shown:

$ sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y

This procedure takes quite a while. In my case, this took close to 2 hours, probably because my internet connection wasn’t quite fast. I believe the upgrade should be faster with blazing fast internet speeds.

Once the upgrade is done, perform an OS upgrade from Mint 19.3 to Mint 20 by running the command:

$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

This will upgrade the entire system to a new version.

Again, this takes a while depending on your bandwidth speeds. It took about an hour or thereabouts in my case.

Once the upgrade is complete, reboot the system for the changes to take effect.

$ sudo reboot

And voila! The welcome screen will immediately confirm that you are now running on.

To verify this, open your terminal and run the command below

$ cat /etc/os-release

You can also confirm this using the neofetch utility. If Neofetch isn’t installed, you can install it using the command:

$ sudo apt install neofetch -y

On your terminal run the neofetch command as shown

$ neofetch