Ubuntu releases a new long-term-supported (LTS) distribution all two years. The 20.04 version (released April 2020) will be maintained until 2025. In LINUX, "update" means short-term- and "upgrade" means long-term-actuation. Today on this foggy, cold and lazy Saturday I dared to do an upgrade of my Ubuntu 18.04 laptop.
As I always save my data after I've worked on them, I did not do a backup (which is recommended). The "Software Updater" (update-manager) showed up some time after logging in, I clicked it to update. Then I started it again and pressed the "Upgrade" button for installing the new distribution.
I waited. Nothing happened. One minute, two minutes, ... they need lots sometimes ... launching the system monitor showed that nothing is going on. No error message, no info message, no update, no upgrade, nothing.
Yes, it is an open-source operating system:-)
I began to read on the internet and experiment on command line.
$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d -f DistUpgradeViewGtk3 --allow-third-party
A graphical user interface came up telling me that I must update all packages first. Haven't I done this just before? So, once again:
$ sudo apt update
....
$ sudo apt upgrade
....
The following packages have been kept back:
libsane-common libsane1
....
I overlooked the message about packages that have been kept back. I did a cleanup and then tried again the distro-upgrade:
$ sudo apt autoremove
....
$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d -f DistUpgradeViewGtk3 --allow-third-party
Again the graphical UI telling me that I must update all packages first. I tried out another upgrade-command:
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
....
The following packages have been kept back:
libsane-common libsane1
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Even after this the upgrade did not work, telling me again that I have to update all packages first.
Now I assumed that the kept-back packages are the problem. I remembered that I once fixed, compiled and installed the "xsane" scanner software and protected it against system upgrades to not lose the fix. Now I had to update these libraries explicitly, possibly losing my fix (fortunately I wrote a Blog about it, so I can repeat it). Here is the force-update command:
$ sudo apt-get install libsane-common libsane1
....
After this, the upgrade through update-manager worked.
For about 90 minutes it installed packages on my 4 cores with 8 GB RAM. Many times the grub bootloader was updated, many times /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-54 was generated. When shutting down it showed the Ubuntu logo together with the laptop's vendor logo (in my case "DELL"). I was thinking "Will I ever see you again?" ...
On computer reboot I saw no Ubuntu/Linux version in my BIOS boot menu. You still have to edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg when you want such.
If you want console output instead of the splash screen during startup, also replace the line
linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.4.0-54-generic root=UUID=your-linux-partition-uuid ro quiet splash $vt_handoff
by
linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.4.0-54-generic root=UUID=your-linux-partition-uuid ro
in /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
Startup has not become faster. Was fast once, but currently is no comparison to WINDOWS 10.
The desktop environment came up with a black mouse cursor (was white in 18.04), black top bar, and a grey semi-transparent side bar. Graphics seem to have improved, very sharp contours.
My auto-login was removed, I had to re-enable it in Settings under "Users".
Desktop screenshot:
Like on 18.04 upgrade all desktop icons were disabled, but with right mouse context menu I could "Allow" them. Launching a graphical application then from one of these icons showed white text color on light-gray background in title-bar, not readable, but some minutes later the title-bar background magically turned to black.
Desktop side bars are now possible on more than one screen. With "Auto-hide the Dock" (Settings -> Appearance) activated they are visible anyway, they hide only when some window overlaps them. When having configured a second side-bar on right monitor, and a full-screen app is on right monitor too, moving the mouse to the left monitor is kind of impossible. The side-bar pops out any time the mouse is over it , and the mouse hangs there. I switched off this feature immediately.
The Alt-Tab key (switch between application windows) did not work any more. It was changed to Super-Tab, I had to restore that in Settings - "Keyboard Shortcuts".
A good screenshot utility is an indispensable work tool. You need it for quickly and precisely communicating bugs on user-interfaces. Adding annotations on such screenshots is a must, point to the fail with an arrow, or frame it with an ellipse. The most useful graphical element is a speech bubble that tells the problem and points to it.
Linux screenshot tools were never sufficient. I found out that Shutter (my previously installed screenshot tool) had disappeared silently from my side bar through the upgrade, so I had to search for a replacement.
A very unusual UI, super-modern. You can add annotations, but you can not modify, move, size or remove it afterwards. There are just "Undo" and "Redo" actions. There are lines, arrows, circles, full or empty rectangles, and text, but no speech bubbles. You must find out that the SPACE key slides in a left-side panel, providing a generic "Thickness" chooser where you can size the currently written text or figure. Edit buttons are arranged around the screenshot image in different layouts, depending on the dimension of the shot, which is a little bit confusing, because you need to find the "Save" button on every screenshot newly among many many others.
Following sceenshot shows the launcher in top-bar:
This comes up when you click "Open Launcher":
Some short help:
Hard to remember name. Ksnip has a better editor than Flameshot. It lets modify, move, size or remove markup after it has been drawn (if you find the "Select" button). The concept is the same as in "Greenshot" (a free WINDOWS tool), but Ksnip also has no speech bubbles.
Happy that my upgrade worked. Upgrades are indispensable. If you stay back too long, you will be lost. We depend on the Internet, the Internet depends on web-browsers. Browsers are evolving fast and change all the time. As they open more and more hardware possibilities, they depend on a current operating systems.
I am really grateful for this free operating system. I've been using it for 23 years now, and always preferred it to WINDOWS. But yes, I am a developer.
ɔ⃝ Fritz Ritzberger, 2020-11-28