Linux Mint does not offer a user-friendly way to upgrade between releases

[clayton craft]

1) The version and edition of Linux Mint you are using (if you are not sure, open a terminal and run "mintwelcome").
Any and all. For example Linux Mint 13, 14, 15.

2) What you did for the problem to happen, and how to reproduce it.
Realized that Linux Mint, for as much user-friendliness it offers, fails to offer an acceptable user-friendly upgrade path between releases.

3) What happened.
Upgrading between releases of Linux Mint requires either:

 a) reinstalling every piece of software - this is very time consuming!

 b) using a hack-ish method of sed'ing your sources and praying to your gods that it succeeds without leaving your system in an unusable state

4) What you expected to happen instead.
Linux Mint to support upgrading between releases without having to do any of the two options above.. just like Fedora, Ubuntu, Windows, OSX, etc.

5) If the problem happened once, sometimes, or always.
Always

[Aedan (arfett)]

This is by design. They don't have the support resources of Canonical so this makes sense.

[clayton craft (craftyguy)]

This impacts the "user friendliness" bottom line that Linux Mint's drum is beating to. New Linux users are drawn to Linux MInt because it's shiny and easy to use. The broken upgrade functionality plus frequent releases leads to disgruntled users.

[BrenBarn (brenbarn-c)]

It does not "make sense" from a user perspective. If a user wants to upgrade without reinstalling, that is what they want, period. As craftyguy says, this is especially egregious since Linux Mint touts its userfriendliness. Having to reinstall your operating system, ever, is not user-friendly.

I can certainly see that it is easier from a development perspective to not support this, but it should be on the radar for future improvements. Part of the appeal of a user-friendly system like Mint is that it shuns the dev-centric mentality so common to other Linux distros. To be user-friendly, you need to make things easy for users, even if that means making it hard for the devs. If an operating system is to be easy to use, it needs to be easy to upgrade when the time comes.

[Vlad Orlov (monsta)]

Ok, this is supported since the last year: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3068