Pre-flight steps for a Linux Mint desktop upgrade

Upgrading from Linux Mint from 18.3 to 19 on my systems was essentially painless.

There are a couple of things that I have gotten into the habit of doing prior to performing systems upgrades to provide me some peace of mind:

  1.  Back up your system.
  2.  Separately back up your .config and .local directories (I am selective in choosing which application preferences to preserve across machines and store them on dropbox).
  3.  Make a list of any PPAs you might be using and remove them from your sources.list or Update Manager. Here is a pointer to a script to get you started.
  4.  I store my dotfiles on a repo in GitHub (and replicate them out to GitLab and BitBucket), so that I can easily restore my bash, vim and tmux settings.
  5.  Make a list of your favorite apps (Personally, I use vimwiki stored in dropbox for my sysadmin notes).
  6.  I've found the following site very useful when turning up a new system: https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/Home (It's Mint-centric and has some very sane recommendations. Don't run the suggestions blindly. Review them closely and see if it applies to you.
  7.  Maintain a separate /home partition so that you can easily restart, or completely blow away, an installation if you need to without fear of losing your personal data.

This may sound like a lot of work to those just getting started in the Linux/Mint world; but, some conscientious janitorial work upfront saves one from frustration down the road.

Hope this helps. Enjoy the upgrade!