Now here be 24.04

[Schwarzer Kater]

Very good!

This explains why my VMs don't show Software Sources in Discover's settings page - there are no .list files at all in /etc/apt/… .
The moment you have one or more .list file it works as intended and Software Sources shows in Discover (mine are third-party ones). Discover does not show additional content of .sources files, though.

This indeed is a bug.

[claydoh]

So I decided to test my hypothesis and copied /etc/apt/sources.list.distUpgrade (the renamed sources.list file, renamed by the upgrade process) to /etc/apt/sources.list and then launched Discover. Clicking on Settings now shows:

i betcha you get duplicate sources warnings from apt if you have both the ubuntu.sources file and the sources.list present.

[Snowhog]

I've filed a bug report with KDE Bugs. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487453

[Snowhog]

i betcha you get duplicate sources warnings from apt if you have both the ubuntu.sources file and the sources.list present.

Could be. I'm not keeping the renamed file. I did this just to test my hypothesis.

[Snowhog]

Well, Harold Sitter (kde.org) commented on my bug report saying the issue isn't with Discover, that Sources list parsing happens inside packagekit, and to file a bug with
packagekit at https://github.com/PackageKit/PackageKit/issues so I did: https://github.com/PackageKit/PackageKit/issues/763

[jglen490]

On my 24.04, I select Discover from the System menu. Then from Discover, I select the hamburger, select Settings and Default Source is displayed on the right side of the box. I select Software Sources, enter my password at the Run as root prompt, and a fully functional Software Sources is displayed with all tabs responding.

I can also select Synaptic from the System Menu, enter my password at the Authentication Required prompt, select Repositories in the Settings menu, and a fully functional Software and Updates box is displayed with all the tabs responding.

The only thing I did after installation was to follow SK's scripts for removal of Snaps/replacement with Mozilla and later to install.

software-properties-gtk

I checked in dpkg and both

software-properties-gtk

and

software-properties-qt

are installed.

And, yes, the software sources list moved as claydoh pointed out earlier. When looking at the details of Software Sources and Software and Updates, respectively, they show the text from the

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/

list and not the former detailed presentation form previous Kubuntus. But

sudo apt update

and

sudo apt full-upgrade

work just fine.

[claydoh]

My malfunctioning virt-manager VM is a clean install, running remotely from the NAS/Homelab system. So I don't have any previous sources.list files that have been renamed or anything.
I am not positive if this was happening on the VM installed on my now-packed away desktop PC. I would have noticed it, I think, from my normal testing habits, but I can't say for sure. it IS odd it isn't happening to everyone.

[jglen490]

Perhaps the upgrade path ...

[Snowhog]

But
sudo apt update


and
sudo apt full-upgrade


work just fine.

Apt isn't affected by the change to the deb822 source format.

[jglen490]

Understand that, it was just an observation re: the changes to how the repo list is now managed - and listed

[Melcar]

Got the update notification today. Decided to go ahead and upgrade as usual using the terminal. Assumed too much this time and when I came back I had a broken system. Seems the upgrade script did not disable my PPAs. It also tried to force install Firefox and Thunderbird snap packages, but sine I had the mozillateam PPA and packages, well, it kind of self-destroyed (broken packages, unmet dependencies... pure carnage). Managed to recover with a btrfs snapshot.

Now I'm debating on a fresh install and jump hoops to avoid snap, or just jump ship to another distro.

[Schwarzer Kater]

[…]
Now I'm debating on a fresh install and jump hoops to avoid snap, or just jump ship to another distro.

See the "Bonus" section of Essential and strongly recommended things to do directly after a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS installation - there are ways to easily get rid of Snap and to use the "traditional" Firefox and Thunderbird. The Mozilla Team PPA will always cause trouble when release-upgrading if you don't intervene "by hand"…

[Melcar]

See the "Bonus" section of Essential and strongly recommended things to do directly after a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS installation - there are ways to easily get rid of Snap and to use the "traditional" Firefox and Thunderbird. The Mozilla Team PPA will always cause trouble when release-upgrading if you don't intervene "by hand"…

Yeah, I've done that and that is how I run my system. I just think it will be annoying if before every OS upgrade Kubuntu will keep forcing snap versions. It's not like the upgrade script gives you an option to keep the current packages.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Slightly OT:

[RANT]

This - unfortunately - is probably Canonical's increasing attempt to force their Snap solution to the Linux world (together with Snap's depencies on AppArmor to fight against Red Hat's SELinux) and probably increase their profit margin and market share by all means (even if it is also somehow indirectly through user's desktop systems).
And AFAIK - and as far as I understand - snapd still relies on out-of-tree AppArmor patches that are only applied in *Ubuntu's kernels - one of the reasons why e.g. openSUSE refuses to ship Snap by default or why SUSE does not really support it.

But who knows what Canonical thinks - they have had a lot of projects and "ideas" during the past decades that were flops. Both from a technical and financial point of view.
There are other bad examples like Fedora - forcing Wayland to people… I know some people who rely on accessibility and disability tools that work tolerably in X11, but not at all in Wayland… OK, someone should simply tell the world that Fedora is just a testing playground for Red Hat and no distribution for everybody. But their own self-promotion condradicts that.

And I know it is cumbersome to reinstall Snap before every release-upgrade of Kubuntu after one has already removed it. The scripts make this at least quite easy for the interested user.
Although I am quite curious how this will work with the release-upgrade to 24.10. After all there is the option - "Minimal Installation" - to not at all install snapd or Snaps in Kubuntu 24.04 and Lubuntu 24.04! So I wonder if a release-upgrade to (K/L)Ubuntu 24.10 will really force one to reinstall Snap or not…

BTW: Debian and Arch are the two major (community driven) distributions that force much less to anybody. No default Snaps, Flatpaks and other things - it is even more or less easy to get rid of systemd there, if one really wants to.

But hey: Windows is certainly the most widespread desktop system, because mankind is so intelligent and altruistic…

[/RANT]

[jglen490]

Yeah, another reason I'm glad I stick to LTS only. Just have to go through the new snap BS once in two years