Upgrade from 18.10 to 20.04 options

I've just spent ages trying to work out how to upgrade from 18.10 to 20.04 now it's almost out. I realize I was on an end of life and would have to upgrade through another end of life and this appeared prohibitively difficult and the advice is to reinstall

I have however just achieved it by just updating my /etc/apt/sources.list from cosmic to focal - I had to remove the EOL source I was using to the standard

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal main restricted universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security main restricted universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-backports main restricted universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates main restricted universe

And then

apt update
apt upgrade
apt dist-upgrade

It gave an error about a pre-removal script for whoopsie, but I managed to sort this with

dpkg --purge --force-all whoopsie
apt install whoopsie

I realized force-all isn't great but I couldn't find another way around it, and whoopsie appears to have been able to report itself after reinstall!

and then carried on with where I was When I try do-release upgrade, it says no new version as it seems to have performed the upgrade okay - lsb_release -a gives 20.04

Is there anything else I need to do? Have I been extremely lucky? Just wanted to put it out there in case anyone else was trying the same

Solution 1:

Yes, you can certainly try upgrading that way. It's a perfectly valid Debian way (indeed, it's the original way).

However, the upgrade path from 18.10 directly 20.04 has not been tested, so we generally don't provide support for it if you encounter unexpected problems.

• Consider running sudo apt autoremove to remove packages that were orphaned by the dist-upgrade. Read the list of proposed removals carefully!

• Consider marking your calendar for late April and late October if you want to stick to the 6-month interim releases of Ubuntu. That way, you won't get caught out with an EOL release again. Alternately, on 20.04, you can change to LTS releases and upgrade every 2 years (mark your calendar for that, too.)

• For in-band release-upgrades by most users, we recommend do-release-upgrade over the method you used. do-release-upgrade has fewer places for the user to make a mistake. Your release-upgrade was, of course, out-of-band since 18.10 has been EOL many months.