Interactive upgrade planning with guided decisions and rollback

[MaBa-81]

Hello Linux Mint team,

during a recent distribution upgrade of a long-lived Mint system with multiple PPAs and third-party repositories (KiCad, CMake, VS Code, NodeSource, Brave, etc.), the upgrade succeeded only after extensive manual intervention.

This led me to an idea that could improve the upgrade experience for advanced users without sacrificing safety or user control.

Proposal: Interactive upgrade planning (assistive, not automatic)

Instead of automatic decisions, the upgrade tool could provide an interactive planning phase during mintupgrade check that:

• Explains why a repository or package blocks the upgrade
• Clearly distinguishes between:
  • unsupported / EOL PPAs
  • vendor repositories
  • packages newer than official versions
• Suggests explicit options, for example:
  • temporarily disable a repository
  • downgrade selected packages to official versions
  • keep software installed but disable updates
• Shows risk level, reversibility, and post-upgrade steps for each option
• Requires a rollback snapshot (e.g. Timeshift) before proceeding

No automatic removals and no guessing user intent — the tool would explain and suggest, the user would decide.

Motivation

Currently, “Fix” actions may loop without clearly exposing the underlying cause (e.g. active PPAs continuously re-introducing newer versions).
An interactive planning layer could reduce confusion, prevent unsafe workarounds, and increase trust in the upgrade process while staying aligned with Mint’s conservative philosophy.

Thank you for considering this idea, and thank you for maintaining such a thoughtful distribution.