With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS released and a long weekend upon us you might be planning to upgrade an existing Ubuntu install to the latest version.
But don’t.
For one, “officially” you can’t since Ubuntu 24.04 LTS upgrades are not yet enabled, neither from Ubuntu 23.10 nor 22.04 LTS.
But that doesn’t stop us folks from upgrading manually.
They hear that a new version of Ubuntu is out and stable, they don’t fancy the faff of a fresh install, and they don’t want to wait for the “new version available” upgrade prompt to appear on their desktop.
So they go to Google for a ‘how to’, learn about the sudo do-release-upgrade -d command, run it, and away they go saying to themselves:
“The final release is stable so upgrading, even with the -d flag should be safe!”
Right now there are major bugs impacting direct upgrades from earlier versions.
We’re talking “your system may become unrecoverable” type issues.
Snafus stem from the switch to Thunderbird snap1 (on installs with the DEB installed upgrading to 24.04 replaces it with the snap) and the complicated tangle of Y2028 time_t transitions2 (anyone who used daily builds will be familiar with the pain they caused).
Critical fixes are on the way but until they arrive and Ubuntu’s developers are able to re-test direct upgrades to verify they solve things (and don’t introduce further issues) official upgrades can’t be enabled and CLI DIY upgrades are strictly not advised.
As of writing this (before I depart for the weekend) those fixes aren’t in place.
My advice for now is to forget what blogs say —stones, glass houses, etc 😅— and do not upgrade through any means until Ubuntu’s engineers give the nod.
Super-duper impatient? Suck it up and download the ISO and do a fresh install instead. Those are not affected by these issues and, on the plus side, you get to see all the fancy new options added to the desktop installer.
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2061918 ↩︎
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/glib2.0/+bug/2063221 ↩︎
Thanks Kim