My main OS is KDE Neon, but I do have a Mint Cinnamon installation for reference and testing purposes on my Dell G3. Now that it is possible to perform the upgrade, I’m doing that.
The first thing I’ve discovered is that the Mint upgrader now completely fails if the person does not have Timeshift set up. I fully approve of the idea of strongly advising users to use Timeshift… I find it a useful tool, and I am one of the apparently 0.1 percent that have made a donation to its author to perpetuate the project. I’m a little disappointed that he’s chosen to neglect it because he hasn’t received enough donations, though. I did my part.
That said, though, I don’t agree that it should force someone to set up Timeshift to be able to upgrade. I have a full Veeam backup of my entire G3, Mint volume included, not that it’s any of Mint’s business, and that backup is up to date. It’s my PC and my choice, and I should not have to be explaining that in the Linux world. A command line switch to disable the Timeshift checking would be an appropriate way of dealing with this, but there does not appear to be such a thing.
As I have said before, if you ask me to do something, I will evaluate the thing in good faith, and I may choose to do as requested. If you try to force me, the odds are strong that I will commit to never doing the thing you are trying to force me to do. This is one such instance; I simply refuse to set up a redundant Timeshift when I know I have a superior image backup already.
Fortunately, there’s a fix for Mint’s upgrader if you wish to opt out of Timeshift. I strongly recommend to have a backup of some sort, but it doesn’t have to be Timeshift.
First install the mintupgrade package as normal, but don’t run it yet.
Navigate to /usr/bin, and open the file mintupgrade as root in the text editor. If it asks what you want to do with the file, select Display. Scroll down to line 223, and find and comment out or delete these lines:
self.progress("Checking your Timeshift configuration")
if not os.path.exists("/etc/timeshift.json"):
self.fail("Please set up system snapshots. If anything goes wrong with the upgrade, snapshots will allow you to restore your operating system. Install and configure Timeshift, and create a snapshot before proceeding with the upgrade.")To comment out a line, simply insert a # symbol as the first character in each of the three lines.
Save the file, and then you can run the upgrade without being pestered about Timeshift. It’s still a bad idea to do this with no backup at all, but it’s your system and your time that it will take to reinstall it if it goes wrong!
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
