 I have installed Linux hundreds of times on other people's machines. I have installed Linux many times on friends' computers, family members' computers. They bring me their old laptops, their old desktops, and Windows is no longer running properly on some of these older machines, and they want something better. They want Linux, you know, because Linux can really revive older hardware, especially. And one of the distributions that I install the most on other people's equipment is Linux Mint because Linux Mint is rock solid stable. Linux Mint is a static release distribution rather than a rolling release distribution. Rolling release is something like Arch Linux, where all the packages on the system are constantly being updated, where on a static release model distribution like Linux Mint, most of your packages never receive an update, right? The only packages that get updated on a system like Linux Mint are things that need constant updates for security reasons, like if the kernel, if there's some bug that gets patched for the kernel, then you'll get an update for that. But for the most part, you're not having all these updates that you would see on something like Arch or Gentoo or these rolling release model distributions. That's what makes Linux Mint great, especially for newer Linux users, is because things are far less likely to break on Linux Mint. But there is one downside to running a static release model distribution like Linux Mint is because it doesn't receive constant updates. Usually you have these major new releases of Linux Mint every few months or so, and that's when you upgrade all the packages on your system. So right now I've got a virtual machine of Linux Mint 20.3. Now Linux Mint actually had a new release a couple of months back. They released version 21. So what I was going to do is I was going to go ahead and upgrade this virtual machine from Linux Mint 20.3 to 21 on camera. And the reason I'm going to do this is because you, of course, if you're running Linux Mint, many people are running older versions of Linux Mint. I'm going to show you how to actually do the upgrade process. Or if you're like me and you've installed Linux Mint on many other computers, friends and family computers, and you installed version 20.3, and now they're bringing you their laptops, hey, can you upgrade this to the latest version? I'm going to show you how right now on camera. So the first thing you need to do is you need to bring up a terminal. So do Ctrl Alt T to bring up a terminal in Linux Mint. And then I'll make it full screen and I'll zoom in. Now before starting a major upgrade from one version of Linux Mint to the next, you do need to run the apt update command. So do sudo apt update, and this will sync the repositories. And the reason we needed to sync the repositories is we wanted to make sure that we're installing the absolute latest version of this package here. su apt install mint upgrade, all one word, mint upgrade. This is the upgrade tool, which allows you to upgrade from one version of Linux Mint to the next. It's not installed by default on Linux Mint because it's probably a dangerous tool. It's not something you want to run. You know, it's one of these tools you install, you run it to get to the next major version. And then once you've installed the next major version, if everything's working right, you uninstall the mint upgrade tool. But right now let's install it. And now that the mint upgrade tool is installed, run the following command sudo mint upgrade. And you have this graphical tool that appears. You can see upgrade to Linux Mint 21 Vanessa. Let's go. I'm going to go ahead and click the let's go button. And it's going to say a series of tests will now be performed to prepare the computer for the upgrade. And I'm just going to click OK. So it's going to run some tests. You can see it's running another apt update. It looks like it's syncing the mirrors again. One of the really cool things about the Linux Mint upgrade tool is when you get this screen that comes up next, which is the system snapshots tool. So when you upgrade from one major version to the next of any Linux distribution, there's always the chance that things could go wrong, things could break. So it's nice that they kind of ask you upfront, hey, would you like to make a snapshot of your system? Just in case the upgrade goes bad, you can roll back to the previous snapshot of your working distribution. So this is very important. So let's go ahead and do this. It says if the upgrade isn't successful, a system snapshot will allow you to go back in time and revert all the changes. So I'm going to click the fix button. And it's going to ask me about snapshots. It says no snapshots are available. So it opens timeshift. And we could go ahead and create a snapshot. And you can see it's syncing files with R-sync. This snapshot could take a while because I've never run one in this virtual machine. If you already got existing snapshots, then this sync typically won't take very long at all because it's only going to have to sync any files that have changed on the system for me. I'm going to have to wait a minute, so I'm going to pause the recording. I'll be back once the snapshot has been created. And it finished creating that snapshot that took about three or four minutes for it to take that very first snapshot here in this virtual machine. Now I'm going to go ahead and close out timeshift to get back to the upgrade tool window. And you can see now it says checking system snapshots. And you can see it's running some checks here in the terminal behind the upgrade tool. And the next screen says phase two, simulation and download. A few more tests will be run and package updates will be downloaded. So I'm going to click OK. And now it says the upgrade simulation. Upgrade will perform the following changes. And it's going to download 1.7 gigs in size. Additional space needed is 1.2 gigs packages being updated, 1,825 packages. So this is the thing with static release models, right? Most packages never receive an update until you do the major version upgrade. And then pretty much everything gets updated all at once. That's why it's kind of risky. That's why it was a good idea to take that snapshot just in case. I'm going to go ahead and click OK. They do give me a list of all the packages that are going to receive update. I'm just going to click OK and away we go. Now with so many packages needing to be updated, almost 2,000 packages, this could take a while. I'm expecting to step away probably for half an hour at least. I'm actually going to go grab me a cup of coffee, maybe eat a donut. You know, I've got a little kitchen here at my office. Well, I'll come back once this major version upgrade from Linux Mint 20.3 to version 21 has finished. And actually I stepped away for about three minutes to go make my cup of coffee. I come back and it's already ready for the next phase three, which is actually the upgrade. So nothing's been upgraded yet. Now when I click OK, I guess it's actually going to upgrade those 1,800 packages. Yeah, you can see the gigantic package list behind me here. And the package upgrade finally completed. I don't know how long that took, but it took a probably 20 minutes or better. I stepped away for a while and I come back and now we're getting this morning about orphan packages, orphan packages or packages that no longer exist in the repos they were installed. But now these are packages that are no longer available in the repository. So do you want to get rid of these orphan packages? Typically, that's what you want to do. And if you click fix, it will go ahead and remove these for you. So that's what I'm going to do. And it took just a minute or two to remove all the orphaned packages. And now it says the upgrade was successful. Reboot the computer for all changes to take effect. And before I'm rebooting, one last thing I want you to do is go ahead and do a sudo apt remove mint upgrade tool because you won't need to ever run this again or at least it'll be many, many months before you'll need to run this again. Of course, for the next version, major version release of Linux Mint, which again, it's going to be a while, you don't want to accidentally run the tool. So let's go ahead and remove it just for safety reasons. And now let's go ahead and do a reboot. And we come to our login manager and the sentiment desktop loads just fine. We get our welcome message. Let me go ahead and correct the display resolution because it looks like it missed that up on the upgrade. So let me make that 1920 by 1080, keep the new configuration. And now it will remember to always be 1920 by 1080. So everything looks fine. It looks like the upgrade went as planned. Of course, I would need to to use this particular virtual machine a little bit to see if there's any little bugs or anything. But the fact that we rebooted and were able to get to a login manager and into our desktop environment, I don't think we're going to run into any major issues. But if we had, of course, we took that time shift back up, right? That that snap shot. And we could have always rolled back to our previous working state. So we could have just rolled back to version 20.3 if things had broke. But it looks like everything is just fine. It's one of the things I really love about Linux Mint is the upgrade path and that particularly that meant upgrade tool is such a nice little tool because it kind of forces you to do the right things, right? It tells you make the snapshot, right? Remove the orphans. Pretty much all you have to do is just click OK all the way through. And everything should work just fine for you. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Dustin Gabe, James Matt, Maxim, Michael Mitchell, Paul West. Why you bald on me? Alex Allen, Armoredragon, Chuck, Commander Rangri, Diokai, Dylan, Greg, Marstrom, Erion, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Arch, and Vitor, Polytech, Realities, or Lust. I think I mispronounced that. Red Province, Steven, Tool, Sniffler, and Willie, these guys, they're my house tier patrons over on Patreon. They are the producers of this episode. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. You want more videos about Linux and Freight Open Source software like Linux Mint, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. I just did a 1800 package update and it worked.