Is there an "easy" way to "upgrade" my existing Linux Mint 12 install to Kubuntu 12.04 beta 2?
I know I could reinstall. Usually I would do a clean install to avoid unexpected issues. But in this case, I don't have time to reconfigure everything from my printers to my installed software, so I am looking for the quick/easy way, but I also want to avoid big risks of an upgrade gone wrong.
I'm hoping to just change some repos and run a few commands from the terminal. I don't mind editing a few config files as long as I can find good HOWTOs. But I don't want to be the pioneer (arrows in back). I'm hoping someone has done this before and has a set of steps.
For context, I recently installed KDE 4.8 SC onto Kubuntu 11.10 using PPAs. This was on another computer. That wasn't a problem. But I decided to do a fresh install of Kubuntu 12.04 later. I like it well enough that I want to change my other computer from Linux Mint 12 to Kubuntu. (I'm going all-in with KDE. It's now my desktop of choice.)
This Linux Mint upgrade will be a move from Gnome and MGSE to KDE, so that will probably complicate things at bit compared to something like upgrading Kubuntu 11.10 to KDE 4.8.
References:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/kde
Is it safe to install Kubuntu-desktop in 11.10?
Best Answer
You can't.
Mint and Ubuntu, no matter how closely related they are (or aren't, as the case might be) are still two different operating systems.
This is a bad idea.
First, you're mixing two different distributions' packages together. For various reasons, this is a bad idea:
Security.
Stability.
Conflicting updates.
If you let updates go through, you encounter the first two problems, and then you're in deep trouble if say, as an example a kernel update comes through!
Also, this makes getting an accurate bug report or stacktrace almost impossible, if not entirely impossible.