Direct update from Freya to Loki?

Question

The last time, when elementary Freya was released, we had to do a clean install from Luna.

Will there be any option to directly upgrade to loki from Freya once Loki stable is released?

I have spent days to setup my system and it would be hard to set it up again.

Answer 1

According to this tweet from the official elementary OS Twitter account, it won't be possible to directly upgrade. A clean install will be required.

See also: Should I download loki beta or freya?

Answer 2

This has already been answered however maybe some keywords need to be added to the original question so it can be found more easily.

Please let us know which search terms you tried.

Answer 3

The official answer is: No

But I did manage to upgrade from freya to loki directly today.

First, upgrade Ubuntu from 14.04 to 16.04, and then upgrade the elementary OS stuff.

Here's how (may not working for everyone, because I got many exceptions, and have done a lot of manual intervention):

1. apt update, apt upgrade, apt dist-upgrade;
2. Make sure Prompt=lts in file/etc/update-manager/release-upgrades;
3. Edit /etc/lsb-release, change DISTRIB_CODENAME=freya to DISTRIB_CODENAME=trusty
4. do-release-upgrade (I got No new release found at the beginning, then I tried update-manager -c). Your 3rd party apt sources will be disabled automatically, and the term trusty will be updated to xenial in file /etc/apt/source.list;
5. Downloading Ubuntu xenial upgrades;
6. I was unable to finish installing upgrades because of error UnboundLocalError: local variable 'e' referenced before assignment in file /tmp/ubuntu-release-upgrader-e78072qe/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeController.py
7. So I did apt update, apt upgrade and apt dist-upgrade to finish (maybe I guess) the installation;
8. Don't reboot your computer right now, the previous elementary components have been removed by apt upgrade and apt dist-upgrade;
9. Re-enable the 3rd party apt sources by uncommenting *.list files in directory /etc/apt/source.list.d/, and replace trusty with xenial;
10. apt update
11. apt install pantheon-greeter pantheon-shell pantheon-terminal pantheon-files slingshot-launcher slingshot gala
12. apt install switchboard wingpanel switchboard-plug-applications switchboard-plug-bluetooth switchboard-plug-display switchboard-plug-datetime switchboard-plug-keyboard switchboard-plug-locale switchboard-plug-mouse-touchpad switchboard-plug-networking switchboard-plug-notifications switchboard-plug-online-accounts switchboard-plug-pantheon-shell switchboard-plug-parental-controls switchboard-plug-power switchboard-plug-printers switchboard-plug-security-privacy switchboard-plug-sharing switchboard-plug-useraccounts switchboard-plug-users
13. I got conflict errors so I removed python3-aptdaemon: apt remove python3-aptdaemon and then continued apt upgrade;
14. apt autoremove
15. reboot and loki is up

I may have forgotten something because I didn't do records in the upgrade process, the above steps are rearranged from the bash history.