Ask Ubuntu is flooded with failed 22.04 -> 24.04 upgrade issues

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I am a regular contributor to Ask Ubuntu.
I am posting this here because it may increase visibility to the Ubuntu developers.

Since yesterday, the homepage is flooded with several questions regarding failed upgrade from 22.04 to 24.04.

In all cases, the software updater tool prompted about the available upgrade, but after updating, the users found no GUI or broken GUI.

If possible, please stop showing the available update ASAP, and please don’t display the available upgrade until all these bugs are fixed.

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I’ve been looking at the same questions on AskUbuntu.

A surge in support requests --like the one we are experiencing-- occurs every two years when LTS release-upgrades are turned on.

If I recall the last LTS cycle correctly, some of the release-upgrade problems were self-inflicted, some eventually became reported bugs, and some reinstalled rather than troubleshoot. After a week or two, the surge reduced back to the normal trickle.

As we all know, many possible causes may exhibit similar symptoms. For many users, this may be years of mismanagment (PPAs and non-Ubuntu repos) catching up to them. Troubleshooting, when users are willing, is essential to identify and report the bug(s).

24.04 went through months of testing, so finding the bug(s), assuming they exist, won’t be easy. It wasn’t easy last time either.

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Having had similar issues myself (booted to a black screen & cursor, nothing else), I wonder how many of these issues are related to the proprietary Nvidia GPU drivers.
I found I had to remove, purge and re-install them to get my desktop back.

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If only that company could just open up their drivers at least as AMD does. Would lessen their work load too; they’d take in fixes and innovation that they want which open source communities do for free out of passion for freedom.

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I also started a do-release-upgrade with nvidia-drivers installed. I got booted out of the desktop environment with a blank cursor. I was able to switch TTY’s (CTRL+ALT+F2) and login and finish the upgrade. The do-release-upgrade process was killed so I finished the upgrade the traditional way by:

  1. ensuring sources were changed to noble where possible and disabling where not.
  2. apt-get update
  3. apt-get dist-upgrade
  4. for my situation I needed to also ensure the 24.04 hwe kernel and headers were installed.
    linux-image-generic-hwe-22.04 → linux-image-generic-hwe-24.04
    linux-image-headers-hwe-22.04 → linux-image-generic-hwe-24.04
  5. run dkms to ensure the nvidia kernel modules were built
  6. apt-get autoremove
  7. reboot
  8. After the upgrade I was missing packages like: gnome-terminal, gnome-shell-ubuntu-extensions, and gnome-shell-extensions.
  9. I installed those and then later noticed that the package ubuntu-desktop was missing… so I reinstalled it. apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop

So far I’ve been running the upgraded system without issue… though this was the worst upgrade experience I’ve had in a long time.

I’ve also found this dkmsbuildall script to be super helpful. I shoved it into /usr/local/sbin/dkmsbuildall

#!/bin/bash
ls -d /usr/src/linux-headers-* \
 | sed -e 's/.*linux-headers-//' \
 | grep generic \
 | sort -V \
 | tac \
 | xargs -n1 /usr/lib/dkms/dkms_autoinstaller start
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I’m seeing a lot of complaints in AskUbuntu, but I’m not seeing a lot of marked (or closed) duplicates.

I have not observed any unusual pattern or single outstanding cause.

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Sometimes those PPAs are necessary. 22.04.1 LTS still delivers a version of VirtualBox that became unsupported last December. It finally stopped working recently and our choices were (1) do with out VMs and not deliver work (2) switch to the PPA provided by VirtualBox. I would love to stick to official releases but this is not the first time that Ubuntu’s slow updates has stuck me with this choice. Or maybe (if slow app updates are the user’s fault) maybe it’s time to encourage people to switch to Mac OS X?

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Several people currently seem to be unable to use do-release-upgrade to upgrade from 22 LTS to 24.04.1 LTS.

Edit: I was not aware that linking to the Ask Ubuntu forum is discouraged and considered a reason for flagging messages as spam, and I apologize for doing so. In case someone does want a source for the above claim, a Google search for “Unable to upgrade from Ubuntu Server 22.04 to 24.04.1” should yield a link to the conversation. (For some reason, it does not turn up in Bing or Qwant.)

Would this be just some random temporary issue, or have upgrades been blocked for the time being, due to the problems mentioned in this thread?

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Neither.

In the linked AskUbuntu question, the phased update blocker does count as “a random, temporary issue,” of course, but there are other blockers in that question that do not. More troubleshooting is needed. There are clues suggesting a possible misconfiguration. There are clues that might go in other directions.

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Thank you @ian-weisser. For the time being, it seems that do-release-upgrade -d will offer the expected 24.04.1 LTS and is a viable workaround. (I was able to upgrade one 22.04.4 LTS system in that manner.)

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This one I found on reddit experienced same issue as @papamoose where he got a blank screen after upgrading, but also his Kubuntu’s Breeze also broke

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kubuntu/comments/1f76pgb/horrible_experience_while_upgrading_from_2204_to/

This one wasn’t as bad as it appears Discover’s Snap backend was broken

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kubuntu/comments/1f5y1hg/after_upgrade_to_2404_discovery_wont_launch/

My computers are on Tuxedo OS (gaming PC) & KDE Neon (work desktop) & Pop!_OS Alpha (laptop) so best I can do is post what I found regarding desktops. Haven’t had issues with my servers when I upgraded from 22.04 to 24.04, however.

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I am hesitant to post on this thread, but I will… I had a miserable experience upgrading a 22.04 workstation. Previously I have done three upgrades 22.04 to 24.04 but before 22.04.1 was official. I had timeshift on the the workstation in question, and it is nowhere near an ethernet socket so relies on wifi. Wifi is good. 300mb/s on a fibre-based LAN. I am mentioning network because on each of my six attempts, the upgrade failed near the end after not being able to download something. Initially it was the esm repositories (Ubuntu Pro); i turned them off and tried again, but other package downloads failed. I moved the main server to the AU mirror, same problems. In each case, networking was left broken with no GUI. This is not good. It seems that the upgrade process breaks easily with network problems, and it seems there are many network problems. Network problems can happen, but leaving the machine in an unsuable and unrecoverable state is a bigger concern. [unrecoverable because with no network and undownloadable packages, where do you go? I am sure via terminal networking could have been re-established but this is not really how it should work]

I did not report a bug sorry; I did report upgrade bugs when it was in beta, but yesterday I had no time; I ended up doing a clean reinstall

This was the worst upgrade experience for me in many many releases.
Hardware is AMD CPU, AMD graphics.

I have set up a 22.04.4 VM to try in a more controlled environment, but currently the upgrade is not available, I hope a sign that something is being worked on.

EDIT: It seems likely I might have run into a problem associated with Bug #2049785 “/usr/bin/update-manager:json.decoder.JSONDecodeErr...” : Bugs : update-manager package : Ubuntu which is apparently fixed but in phasing.

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A recent answer in the Ask Ubuntu thread (I cannot repost the link – error “sorry you cannot link to that host” – but see above) points to a plausible cause.

The file https://changelogs.ubuntu.com/meta-release-lts – which seems to have been changed two days ago – does not contain the 24.04.1 LTS release, even though it would have been expected to be found there. Presumably, it was previously there, as some Ask Ubuntu contributors were offered the upgrade a few days ago. Other files in the same directory do contain 24.04.1 LTS.

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For details on that, I’ll refer readers to Noble missing from meta-release-lts

the upgrade was disabled due to a critical bug in ubuntu-release-upgrader in the way it’s using the apt solver. This is being worked on and as soon as this is fixed, we’ll re-enable the upgrades.

I’m quoting Utkarsh Gupta from the Ubuntu Release team from a ML post.

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FYI: The mailing list archive is here: The Ubuntu-release Archives

If you try to follow the link to the mailing archive from Ubuntu Release Team in Launchpad you see only three 2018 messages.

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It also lists Jammy as being on 22.04.3, while the last release is 22.04.4… Is that because of the roll-back, or an unrelated bug??

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It’s a mess.
The display text has been changed (to thin gray and awful) and reloading old fonts and using Tweak doesn’t cut it.
The snap version of VLC doesn’t work
Thumbnails are not working and none of the “solutions” have corrected it.
Thunderbird stopped the upgrade (I managed to get around that.
The PPA for launchpad.net w.r.t appimage had to be removed because it stopped software updates.

The whole thing is ugly. Considering going back to 22.04
No one should attempt this upgrade IMHO

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Closing this topic, as it has become a dump for random complaints.
There was indeed a problem with the release-upgrade, now resolved…but seemingly none of the discussion here helped to identify the issue nor to fix it.