Just a warning, I tried the same when upgrading from nadia to petra, and because I had compiled from source my Intel graphics driver, it screwed horribly and I spent hours trying to remove or recompile and reinstall it without success.

In the end, reinstalling Mint from a USB drive (preserving $HOME) took just a few minutes and the driver worked instantly.

So don't forget about this kind of dependencies before considering a dist-upgrade.