I recently downgraded from Mint 21 back to 20.3, just for stability’s sake and to use some apps which were disabled or removed from the Ubuntu 22.04 base. Now that there has been some time for Ubuntu to fix some of those issues, and Mint has released the next version (Vera, 21.1), I thought I would give it a try, and thought a few of our readers might be interested in the result. Here are the steps I took and the time it took to do them:
Upgrade from 20.3 to 21
Downloaded mintupgrade
Started @18:41
Timeshift completed @18:47
Fix holds, search for orphans
Phase 2 @18:47 -18:48
Package download @19:00 (over 2400 files)
Phase 3 – Upgrade @19:00-19:37
Looking for foreign packages, fix @19:37
Final phase @19:39
Reboot @19:39
Upgrade from 21 to 21.1
Upgrade to 21.1 started @19:41
Download started @19:42
Completed @19:47
Updates completed @19:51
Tweaks – removed vestiges of libreoffice, pysolfc @19:58
So, to upgrade through two versions of Linux Mint, it took me about 77 minutes, but that is including a couple tweaks of my own that you might not do.
In the end, PySolFC is still not working, and neither is Grub Customizer. Both of them have been fixed, but neither fix has been picked up by Ubuntu or Mint for use in the .deb package; I have been told that PySolFC is fixed in the Snap version.