Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

[Feedback] Few glitches at the UX of an upgrade process

Open
#72 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
desktop

Research direction

Start in the mintupgrade upgrade-process UI and inspect the Package repositories, Foreign packages, and Orphan packages dialogs, along with the window-close handling. Compare each dialog's current behavior with the requested confirmation, explanatory text, button wording, and copy-paste support. Done means the requested UX changes work consistently across all named dialogs and the upgrade flow remains usable.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I've recently used mintupgrade to update from 20.3 to 21.1. Overall, that is a great utility that makes the process easier. But a few glitches I spotted may be low-hanging fruits for improvements.

Describe the solution you'd like

mintupgrade window can be easily closed by a mistake.

It does not ask for any confirmation, and I've accidentally closed it a couple of times during the process. Suggestion: add a confirmation dialog when closing mintupgrade.

Counter-intuitive "Package repositories" dialog

"Package repositories" dialog lists PPAs that should be disabled. Clicking the "Fix" button just opens a main window of the "Software sources" utility. The "Fix" test on a button suggests that the suggested change will be applied automagically, and that is not obvious that the user has to switch to PPA tab of the "Software sources" utility, and disable PPAs manually. The suggestion here is to add an explanation text to "Package repositories" dialog, for example:

Clicking the "Fix" button will open "Software sources" utility. Please disable mentioned package repositories manually on "PPAs" tab of "Software sources" utility

Also, how about renaming the button to something like "Edit package repositories"

Foreign packages dialog is not clear

The "Foreign packages" suggests downgrading few packages. Again, what does "Fix" button mean here? Is mintupgrade utility going to apply the proposed change automagically, or should user perform something like sudo apt install shutter=75.0 manually? It would be great to add some explanation text to this dialog.

Orphan packages dialog does not allow copy-pasting package names

Maybe I did not get the idea, but as far as I understand, I have to type the names of all orphan packages I'd like to keep at Upgrade Tool preferences. It would be much easier if I could at least to copy-paste package names from Orphan packages dialog as a text. Even better (yet more complex) option would be to have a small "save icon" button near each package name at the list, so user would just click these buttons to keep some orphan packages installed.

Describe alternatives you've considered
A clear and concise description of any alternative solutions or features you've considered.

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots/illustrations about the feature request here.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
50
Forks
20
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Getting set up

This project ships no dev container, Dockerfile or contributing guide, so setting up is up to you: start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from linuxmint/mintupgrade

All issues in linuxmint/mintupgrade

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.