Last week, the first point release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS arrived, and upgrades from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to the newest one officially enabled.
However, those upgrades didn’t go smoothly for everyone who tried, be it on Ubuntu server or Ubuntu desktop.
To prevent further headaches, Canonical has decided to pause upgrades to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS while its developers work out the kinks.
Yesterday, the ‘noble’ release got edited out of the meta-release-lts file (which Ubuntu systems check to detect new versions), preventing users from upgrading to Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS through officially-supported methods.
Folks attempting to upgrade, but suddenly finding they couldn’t, were left wondering why.
In reply, Canonical explains that it halted upgrades “due to a critical bug in ubuntu-release-upgrader in the way it’s using the apt solver” (though other recurring issues have been reported on Launchpad and mentioned on social media in the past week).
Of course, issues ought to be expected in any major OS upgrade, especially for LTS-to-LTS transitions, as upgrading an extensive foundational stack that’s 2 years old is far from trivial. Even the most attentive testing prior to release won’t uncover every edge-case calamity in time.
Plus, this isn’t the first time Noble upgrades have caused issues. When Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was released in April, users on Ubuntu 23.10 were able to upgrade, but later advised not to due to critical bugs (unrelated to this one).
Developers are now working to resolve the issue causing LT- to-LTS upgrades to fail (for some users), but until those fixes are ready, upgrades will remain paused.
Upgrades to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS from 22.04 will be re-enabled once everything is out, in place, and deemed stable enough.
Still, once those upgrades are re-enabled I’d recommend anyone planning to make the leap to keep some ‘recovery media’ (like a bootable Ubuntu installer on a USB drive) to hand — just in case.
Thanks Scott