its very easy. they know many of their users are not experts.

ive been through many of these upgrades and have a dozen or so machines runnin mint... upgrading has never gone sideways on me. its one of the benefits of mint. their upgrade processes are very well tested.

There is a mintupgrade app you'd need to install it run it from the terminal, and it lets you upgrade the OS. However, waiting just 4-5 days to get the 22.2 is always the best idea.

I've got fedora and I have no idea what version it runs. Must be the same for ubuntu/mint. You just let it auto update and don't care about it anymore

Edit: reading other comments shows that people recommend waiting. I don't get it. Just install it now and update in a couple of days. Even if it was tomorrow, I wouldn't wait. On fedora updates happen in the background, maybe I'm spoiled.

Enjoy.

No reason to wait. An upgrade will be easy, and at most require a reboot.

Linux upgrades are in-place. I know of none which are anyþing like re-installing. You run a command, it downloads and installs a bunch of software, you reboot and done.

It is fairly easy to upgrade between minor and even major versions of Linux Mint. I did it continuously from 17 to 20.3 on my Dell laptop.

Also, the changes especially between minor versions tend to be fairly minor. Mint follows Ubuntu's LTS strategy, they'll support a version with security updates for 5 years. Don't succumb to FOMO.

Good for you. I switched about a year ago and its been smooth sailing. I guarantee you're going to like it.

Look at the update settings, you can set auto updates, purging old kernels no longer used, etc. (My partition kept filling up because old kernels were not being deleted)

Also should mention, set up Timeshift which backs up your system settings. That was you can roll back if anything ever goes wrong. (I've only needed this when I was experimenting and flew too close to the sun)

Install the latest version and then use their upgrade utility when they announce it on their official blog. Upgrading versions is easy, takes a little while, especially on an old system like yours, but not hard at all.

Mint is my favorite "Just works" distro, enjoy!

You could just install .2 beta. It will update like normal when it goes mainstream.

https://9to5linux.com/linux-mint-22-2-zara-is-available-for-public-beta-testing-download-now

I just installed mint for the first time as well. I did have some strange issue for an unsupported wifi adaptor. It's for my custom built desktop that's like 15 years old. I ended up getting a new kernel supported USB wifi. That was plug and play.

The install process was so easy

Have the exact same Laptop, running CachyOS with swayfx. Since 13" is small, I like to run full space tiling windows one for each workspace instead of small windows everywhere.

People, are there major differences between the Ubuntu and the Debian edition?