A thank you from a grateful user

[NickStone]

I have been a user of MX since MX-16 and have used many of the versions since then. I had a laptop whereby I had installed MX-19 on it. The laptop had since been scrapped but not before I removed the hard disk (with MX-19) and now use it with a disk caddy connected to my HP EliteDesk PC.

As MX-19 had come to end of its life, I was planning on upgrading it to either MX-21 or MX-23. I found this wiki page https://mxlinux.org/wiki/system/upgradi ... nstalling/ about upgrading from MX-19 to MX-21. I followed the instructions to the letter and managed to upgrade to MX-21 on the old hard disk.

A big thank you to the person or persons who wrote that wiki page. You really know your stuff when it comes to MX.

Nick Stone

[Adrian]

Hey Nick, thank you for writing this. As the one who wrote that I've been inundated with "I tried that but it didn't work" complains and even mods here on the forum claim that it works only 50% of the time... so it's heartening to see at least one person take advantage of my how-to...Wish I didn't have to put "DISCLAIMER", "WARNING"... etc, but so is life.

[Jerry3904]

I adore users who look in the Wiki...

[aika]

... mods here on the forum claim that it works only 50% of the time ...

Yes - logical. Debian upgrade by changing "buster" to "bullseye" via /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ files does not always work. The days when you could upgrade to the next Debian version easily and cleanly are unfortunately over.

[Adrian]

Never had a problem if I had enough space, it's a bit of a guess which .conf files to update and which to keep but by now I have same experience with that.

[user101]

Sounds like you saved a heap of time.

The only reason I reinstalled MX-Linux to one of the later releases was because of an app called kdenlive, which I would aways grab the latest appimage of. If everything worked fine then I'd be using an older version for as long as possible, supported or not. I don't delight in having to do reinstalls. With my reinstall, it took me at least a week to get it 'feeling like home' again. After that I created a Snapshot ISO because I vowed I would never go through that again. LOL.

[asqwerth]

I would like to add a warning for MX23 KDE users that in-place upgrades to MX25 KDE, assuming Debian Trixie will run Plasma 6, will NOT be straightforward as there are significant changes in Plasma.

As rolling distro users found out, the upgrade from Plasma 5 to 6 could mess up/crash the desktop, particularly if the user used 3rd party desktop and application themes, sddm themes, or plasmoids.

The advice for rolling distro users was to switch all theming back to native Breeze and disable all 3rd party plasmoids before carrying out the upgrade. If you didn't do so and your desktop crashed, then you would need to wipe your plasma configs from tty to get it working again.

That being the case, there may not be much time savings in doing in-place upgrades since you will still have to reconfigure your desktop afterwards. Some themes/plasmoids you were using in Plasma 5 may not be maintained and upgraded by the devs to work with Plasma 6.

Even if you backed up your configs before wiping them (as per the instructions here https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Pl ... _strangely ), you will have to spend time enabling and testing each 3rd party element one by one (and maybe searching for upgrades from KDE store/via Discover) to see if it will cause a crash.

[Jerry3904]

Interesting. Maybe that lies behind this news on DistroWatch today:

The KDE project is working on its own Linux distribution, appropriately named KDE Linux. This distribution is intended to be built on Arch Linux and feature the advanced Btr filesystem for easy snapshots and rollbacks. The project's wiki also reports the distribution will be immutable and use Wayland desktop sessions by default. Though releases are not ready for the public yet, the project is testing disk images of the upcoming distribution. KDE Linux is intended to address shortcomings with the KDE neon project which has the same goal of showcasing the latest KDE experience: "KDE neon, KDE's first version of a self-made OS. KDE neon fulfills the 'distributed by KDE' requirement, but fails on the reliability angle due to the Ubuntu LTS base that ironically becomes unstable because it needs to be tinkered with to get Plasma to build on it, breaking the LTS promise."