I came across an interesting reddit post titled "How do I update while maintaining a minimal desktop?".
The poster ran sudo do-release-upgrade
on a Kubuntu 18.04 system which was created using the minimal install option (available in Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu Mate 18.04 as well).
The result was an upgrade to a full version of Kubuntu 18.10.
My question: is there any way for a user of a minimal install of 18.04 to upgrade to a minimal 18.10 or must such users do a clean minimal install of 18.10.
Best Answer
First of all I can't understand the trade-off of upgrading LTS to non-LTS.
LTS releases are highly recommended for real work. The non-LTS's 9 months support cycle is too short. Upgrading to non-LTS will result in 4 unneeded upgrades (18.04 LTS → 18.10 → 19.04 → 19.10 → 20.04 LTS) to next LTS.
TL;DR: but Ubuntu MATE upgrades normally with
do-release-upgrade
.Below is a table for comparison for Ubuntu MATE:
Legend:
do-release-upgrade
;The result: yes, number of installed packages differ by 117 packages. But if I compare the list of packages from clean 18.10 and upgraded - they differ mostly by the libraries. No heavy packages were installed. You can see the diff.