Leaving Linux Mint After Doing MATE 1.6 Update

[clem]

If we were happy to do the same as Ubuntu it wouldn't be hard.. we'd just use their upgrade tool as is or we'd adapt it. If it's not in Mint there's a reason why it was removed. Underneath Mint/Ubuntu there's the very same APT technology and upgradeable system base. It's relatively easy to upgrade but it's not without risks. Making things trivial without any explanations on the risks involved, like Ubuntu does, simply isn't something we want to do.

You can appreciate how much effort we put into upgrade filtering (mintupdate), the rationale behind warning about base upgrades (http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2) and our recent move to LTS-only.

We'll make a big shiny button for people to upgrade 17.x to 17.x+1 and it won't just be trivial, it will be safe as well. If you want to upgrade say 16 to 17, you can do so as well, and maybe that's ok for you if you're comfortable with package management, but it's not for everybody, so when it comes to defining the recommended path to every users out there, at the cost of not looking cool and convenient, we'll give true advice and try to keep novice users away from situations they can't solve.