You can manually edit the APT-sources to point to the new release and then let it perform a dist-upgrade, which is, as far as I understand it, the same as Ubunt

You can manually edit the APT-sources to point to the new release and then let it perform a dist-upgrade, which is, as far as I understand it, the same as Ubuntu or Fedora do automatically. The Linux Mint devs just don't think that's a good way of handling upgrades, so they don't have a button for it. You can read their reasoning here in section E : https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2