On 22 Apr 2026 16:40, Martin McGlensey via Boost wrote:
Peter, Looks like I'm going to do a clean install of thelatest Mint Cinnamon. No upgrades are available for 20.1. If I use timeshift to backup my system will it put the 20.1 back on the system? I only want to backup/restore the software on the pc. I thinnk the Mint software update saves a list of the installed app not the app its self. How woild you recomend I proceede? I don't know much about Linux Mint and timeshift, but usually backup software allows you to select which directories you want to backup. Normally, you would backup application settings (e.g. /etc and ~/.config) and maybe the parts of your home directory you care about (e.g. ~/Documents). In case if you have to reinstall your system, you would restore the system settings, which means the application versions will remain as they were after the system reinstall, only their settings will be restored from backup. You will have to install applications anew after the clean system install, though.
However, I'm not sure a clean installation is your only option. Again, I haven't used Linux Mint, but from my Ubuntu and Debian experience, it should be possible to upgrade to a newer release, but only one major release at a time. Judging by this discussion: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=398556 you should be able to upgrade to 20.3 first, then to 21.1 (or maybe a later 21.x version, I don't know), and so on. If the update manager doesn't allow it, you might simply update apt settings to a newer (next major) release and perform the upgrade using apt. It is not guaranteed that nothing will break along the way, bit you should be able to keep all your settings and applications. If you do go with the upgrade route, do backup your files and settings anyway. This way, if anything goes wrong, you will still have the option of a clean install and restoring settings from the backup.