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About a year ago, Winter of 2020, I installed Kubuntu 19.10 and kept up with regular updates through the "Discovery" gui. But it never notified me about the need to upgrade to 20.04 and now I'm stuck with a broken apt in need of going through a particular process(which I would much prefer not having to do) for EOL upgrades.

Is this situation unique to odd-numbered releases (like 19.10, 17.04 etc)?

Can this situation also occur when on an LTS release? LTS releases take longer to reach EOL, but what happens then? Can this stuck/broken state still occur?

alec
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2 Answers2

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The situation can occur on ANY release of Ubuntu, since a stuck/broken apt is usually caused by the human's folly.

By far, the most common causes of a stuck/broken apt are third-party (non-Ubuntu) repositories, PPAs, wrong-version repositories, and/or manually downloaded packages.

The most common cause of stuck-by-a-missed release is that you clicked "do not remind me again" when the system DID prompt you that a newer release of Ubuntu is available. That also counts as human folly.

Avoid those, and you won't have a stuck apt.

If you are using a 32-bit (i386) version of Ubuntu 18.04, you won't get upgrade prompts for 20.04 or newer releases. Ubuntu has dropped the 32-bit Desktop stack since 18.04. However, you should simply get a notification from this case instead of a stuck/broken apt. 32-bit libs for steam and wine and other cases continue to be upgraded normally on 64-bit (amd64) systems.

  • If you can reproduce a stuck/broken apt on a stock install of Ubuntu using only packages in the correct version of the Ubuntu repositories (and without using --force), please file a bug report so we can fix it.

  • If you can reproduce system-never-prompted-me-to-upgrade on a stock install of the previous release (that is still supported), then please file a bug report. The Ubuntu developers definitely want to know, step-by-step, how you accomplished that.

  • Apt provides lots of troubleshooting output. Advice: Read it. Every time.

user535733
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Yes. The repositories for older releases that are not supported get moved to an archive server. This happens quicker in non LTS versions.

https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

To fix apt, you need to update your sources.list file to prepend old-releases as explained in

How to install software or upgrade from an old unsupported release?

Katu
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