Unsupported updates disaster

[jpayne]

I was getting messages warning that it was time to upgrade from 23.10 to 24.04, so I decided to update everything I could before doing the upgrade. KDE displays a list of repositories, and I made the mistake of unchecking a box called 'Unsupported updates.' Discover crashed, and on re-starting, it reported that I had zero packages installed. Nothing I could do would recover it, and it sucked me into a downward spiral from which I ended up having to install 24.04 and all of my software from scratch.

When I reported the bug to the kde.org team, they responded that 'Unsupported updates' wasn't one of their features, and that my version of Discover was out of date. I don't understand how that happened -- did Kubuntu include an out-of-date version of Discover? And does Kubuntu add the repository list on their own, i.e., it's not part of KDE?

[jlittle]

I think they are saying the problem lies with Ubuntu or Kubuntu, as we use the Ubuntu repositories. From the KDE project's perspective the version of Discover packaged with 23.10 will be old now, and I think they'd consider out of date all but the very last 5.x.

Of course, you should have had good backups before doing the release upgrade. (And, if you'll excuse the proselytizing, given enough space, using btrfs, backing out the failed upgrade would take a minute and a reboot.)

[claydoh]

The Software Sources tool tool you accessed via Discover isn't a KDE tool - it is an Ubuntu-specific one. The sources listed directly in Discover would have had different labels, and not 'friendly' names.
Like this:

You were using this:

The "unsupported updates" is actually the "backports" section of the Ubuntu repos, which provides some newer software versions ported from newer releases back to a previous one.
This is not always vital in itself, but that will depend on your specific set of installed software. Some KDE and Plasma packages may be in Backports, but usually in LTS releases. I suspect something else was disabled as well, something that is probably important.

Now, to fix it you can open the Software Sources too separately by running

sudo software-properties-qt

And undoing everything you changed.


Or by manually editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file and removing the '#' from the appropriate lines.
If you choose this route, copy the contents of the file to a reply here, and we can show you where to do so.

Then try updating from the command line, to see if there are any errors.

The upgrade tool will disable any repos that are necessary before beginning - addon repos and PPAs - so you should not need to do anything yourself here, in most cases.