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Linux

Ubuntu Upgrades Now Arrive with a Simple Prompt (and Security Fixes) (techrepublic.com) 34

"After a slight delay due to an installer issue, the first point release for Ubuntu 22.04 has been officially released," swrites Jack Wallen for TechRepublic.

"Although point releases are often overlooked by users, because they aren't major upgrades, this time around you should certainly run the upgrade immediately." The biggest reason is that this point release combines all of the security fixes and improvements that have been added since the initial release of Jammy Jellyfish. So, if you haven't bothered to upgrade Ubuntu 22.04 since you first installed it, which you should have been doing all along, this point upgrade will add everything you've missed in one fell swoop. One of the biggest upgrades for end users will be the ability of 20.04 users to upgrade to the latest release without having to touch the command line. At some point, users of 20.04 will see an upgrade prompt on their desktops, allowing them to easily make the jump to 22.04.1. This is a big deal because previously such upgrades would have required running several commands. That means no more:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
sudo do-release-upgrade -y

Another point release found in 22.04.1 is GNOME 42, which features a new enhanced dark mode and switches to Wayland by default, with the inclusion of Xorg for unsupported hardware.

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Ubuntu Upgrades Now Arrive with a Simple Prompt (and Security Fixes)

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  • With Solus I just clicked update, and got the most recent version of everything.

    What's the news in this?

  • by dvice ( 6309704 ) on Saturday August 20, 2022 @10:47AM (#62806317)

    I upgraded 3 different LTS machines to 22.04. All of them failed to boot after the upgrade, each one with different reason with one machine having 2 different problems.
    1. Installer checks that there is enough disk space, but there seems to be a bug in it. It run out of disk space and installation failed. Luckily it was just the kernel and grub that failed to install, so no big deal.
    2. Nvidia drivers somehow stopped working. This was fixed by uninstalling old drivers and reinstalling new-ones.
    3. libnih1 failed to install. This was pretty hard to solve, but eventually I managed to purge the old version of the library and installation succeeded.
    4. Firefox snap failed to install. It was not that severe issue, but somehow after that issue, boot failed. I uninstalled firefox and managed to get the computer to boot. Snap installation never started working, so I installed the deb. version outside of ubuntu package system.

    3 out of 3 failed boots is pretty bad, even if one of them was just because of lack of disk space. I have had some problems before also, but never anything in this scale, so I am a bit worried if they have all in control.

    • I have noticed the quality going downhill too. I had the same problem with snap, except in my case, all the snaps broke. I removed snap and also installed the deb firefox, much better.

    • Ubuntu, the windows of Linux. I used to install Ubuntu server on some embedded devices. If the hardware clock was off slightly it would fail in the middle of the install and not tell you why. Ok great let's see the install.log file it generated. Oh wonderful it's 10 megabytes of solid text and you'd think the end of the file would say why it failed? Nope of course not that would make too much sense.

      • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        lets not be insulting to windows, a 5 year old could install it and have a working system at the end of 10 min or so

    • 3 out of 3 failed boots is pretty bad

      I think I only ever once had an upgrade pass without issue on Ubuntu. I feel like they try to change too much and that the system is utterly unable to cope if you dare to install something that isn't blessed by the package manager, or have any kind of configuration that isn't the stock standard one.

    • by reiscw ( 2427662 ) on Saturday August 20, 2022 @03:46PM (#62806827)

      I cannot get over the decision Ubuntu made to go with Snaps. It's the main reason I run Mint. Mint has its issues also, but I cannot abide the idea that Firefox cannot start quickly on an Ryzen 5850U. On Mint, the dosbox package has some issues, so I grabbed the dosbox-staging flatpak. It starts immediately, no issues -- completely different than the Firefox snap experience. If someone here wants to explain to me why Canonical has invested so much in Snap, I would love to here the explanation. Maybe there is something I'm missing, but I've never had issues with either Appimage or Flatpak.

      • > If someone here wants to explain to me why Canonical has invested so much in Snap

        Something about making commercial software available for a cut in the Ubuntu store. So I've heard.

        I don't begrudge them revenue but janky homebrew technology is never the way. Unity and Mir and upstart and other weird Ubuntu stuff never lasts. So I just use Debian.

      • by dvice ( 6309704 )

        Mozilla asked Ubuntu to switch the default to snap. I don't know if they asked Ubuntu to give up .deb completely as they did.

        Reasoning is that users will get latest Firefox instantly from Mozilla, instead of waiting traditional 2 days for Ubuntu to package it.

        • Yeah, my experience exactly, that Ubuntu has gotten windowish. My Firefox after switching to Snap was so slow to start, then it just started quitting frequently just because someone else than me knows better that I would like a sudden restart and update. No, not on my machine! Why would I want to return to Windows experience, have left that long time ago. Farewell to Ubuntu it was. Not sure of what inertia so many still advocate it as recommended to new users. Good old Debian is way better. And no Snapcrap!
        • If that's true, then why the hell did I switch to the official Mozilla PPA to get rid of the Firefox snap?! They seem to update pretty quickly and their deb packages work great.

  • Just pick a different Linux Distro.

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday August 20, 2022 @11:21AM (#62806407)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Saturday August 20, 2022 @11:39AM (#62806447)

      That isn’t entirely true, yes, step 3 will technically skip step 2, but step 2 stabilizes your current software to current levels before you do a dist-upgrade. Sometimes (Ceph and MariaDB for example) skipping over upgrading to the latest ‘old’ version, may result in very broken/corrupt setups.

      The problem is that developers don’t (want to) test and support migration paths from every released old version to the latest version. Apt-get upgrade does an in-release upgrade and re-stabilizes the system to a known point.

      If this new method skips all the necessary in-between steps before doing major version upgrades, expect even more brokenness every release.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • but step 2 stabilizes your current software to current levels before you do a dist-upgrade

        That's not true. They both install the same version of packages in one go, the only difference is dist-upgrade will also delete old dependencies automatically (no need to autoremove), has a conflict handling hierarchy rather than failing the upgrade, and will also upgrade packages which rely on the install status of other packages (not just a dependency), these are completely ignored by the normal upgrade.

  • Backup /home for safety, install from scratch, preserving /home.

    It's FOSS, folks. It's already orders of magnitude easier and more hassle-free to install than Windows, you can't expect them to cover every borked motherboard or bios.

    Sidenote: I did mine from 20 LTS to 22 LTS and this time it went smooth AFAICT (a first). If it's borked, I will do the above. Still faster than most Windows updates.

    • by dvice ( 6309704 )

      That would most likely fix majority of issues, but that strategy has two problems.
      1. Not everything is at home. You lose configs you have at /etc for example and possibly some crons and other customizations
      2. You need to reinstall all custom software, assuming you even remember what it was. Unless you have stored a record of what you have installed.

      • 1) If the user has done that, I'm certain they can fix up whatever after a reinstall. If they have half a brain they'll also know to tarball the damn /etc and /var directories. (And to cherrypick from them after installation.)

        2) dpkg -l > ~/"list_of_software_`date +%d%m%y%H%M%S`".txt Will do you just fine for Ubuntu. Any thing else has a similar method. If not an outright GUI for making a list (Synaptic Package Manager). If all else fails, Open the menu and hit the PRTSCN key. (A solution from Windoze.
  • aren't point updates supposed to install all patches that apt update installs? why would you need to first install all patches before moving up to the point release?

    • why would you need to first install all patches before moving up to the point release?

      That's if you're updating from a previous version (in this case, 21.10 or 20.04).

  • by atol ( 620255 )
    Neatly the Nvidia 515 GPU driver will fail to install and whole setup process might fail with kernel panic on next boot if prior to do-release-upgrade the driver is not changed to Nouveau driver. Like in the software & updates apps additional drivers list I will state: proprietary, tested.
  • Ha ha ha ha bloody ha.

    Canonical are constantly looking for soft lock-ins (i.e., ones that are a hassle to break but theoretically possible). Snap is one, wayland is another. Useless shit no one needs.

    • Wayland broken the Simple Screen Recorder app I really like, so I went back to 20.04. SSR is great for grabbing clips of anything, (like Netflix or HBOmax). For clips it works well along with the Lossless Cut app. Ubuntu 22.04 has its own screen recorder in the OS, but you can not grab clips from Netflix, etc. with it.

  • It can fail spectacularly if you have installed other software from PPA or anywhere else that has conflicting package names or versions. Also, I have much better luck upgrading from the command line with do-release-upgrade than using the GUI. I've had to reinstall systems when a X, GTK, or Gnome library was upgraded and then another package failed to upgrade leaving me with a system that was unusable.
    • I've had systems that failed to upgrade from the GUI just because updating X or one of it's components terminated the session along with the upgrade script.

      Never upgrade from the GUI is the hard lesson learned from that. I'd hope Canonical has fixed that problem before rolling this out, but I'm not holding my breath. Looking forward to the massive number of posts / YouTube videos when the inevitable happens though.
  • You've been able to update from one release to another via the GUI for... well, I don't remember exactly how many years, but certainly since at least 16.04, and I think even longer than that.

    So no, this isn't "a big deal", because it's simply not even accurate in the first place.

  • Yesterday's update broke my add-apt-repository program. Now I can't install firefox from ppa. I dont use snaps, period. I never will. This broke my system. They did not create a solid upgrade.

If all else fails, lower your standards.

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