Well, it’s some time now since the Raspberry Pi foundation released the all new and shiny Raspbian image based on Debian Buster. Unfortunately, they do not support any upgrade path.

But, you can still try and follow the standard Debian upgrade procedures. So did I. And here is a little journey of what happened to me or rather, what I should have known before I started the distribution upgrade:

• Uninstall aufs-dkms and docker. You can reinstall it afterwards, but it will simply fail to compile
• Stop dphys-swapfile service and remove /var/swap. It will be created again after a reboot

The rest just worked like a charm. Then and when I had to make a decision if I wanted to keep or replace a configuration file, but that’s about it.

If you have the desktop version of Raspbian installed, you’ll have to remove the following packages:

sudo apt purge timidity lxmusic gnome-disk-utility deluge-gtk evince wicd wicd-gtk clipit usermode gucharmap gnome-system-tools pavucontrol

There is also a nice blog post on raspberrypi.org about the new features and some general information about a possible upgrade procedure.

The actual upgrade

The steps involved are simple.

1. Modify /etc/apt/source.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list file and replace stretch with buster.

2. Then as root, run the following commands:

    apt update
    apt upgraade
    apt dist-upgrade
    apt autoremove -y
    apt autoclean
   

Some people also remove the apt-listchanges package to save time. But I believe, it depends on your installation (the amount of packages) and if you really care about 5 minutes more or less ;-)