Upgrading Tex Live from 2015 to 2016 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Solution 1:

If you are happy to upgrade your system version of TeX Live you can install the very latest from a PPA. Add the PPA and install TeX Live from a Terminal as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/texlive-2016
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install texlive

This installed with no issues on my own Xenial system:

andrew@athens:~$ tex --version
TeX 3.14159265 (TeX Live 2016/Debian)
kpathsea version 6.2.2
Copyright 2016 D.E. Knuth.
There is NO warranty.  Redistribution of this software is
covered by the terms of both the TeX copyright and
the Lesser GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file
named COPYING and the TeX source.
Primary author of TeX: D.E. Knuth.
andrew@athens:~$ 

And hopefully will install with no issues on your system as well :)

References:

• PPA TeX Live 2016: Backport of TeX Live 2016 packages for LTS releases

Solution 2:

If you want the latest TeXLive, follow the instructions at https://www.tug.org/texlive/

There is no problem with doing this, as it will not interfere at all with your system. You can install TeXLive in any directory you want (even in your home directory), so it is totally independent of Apt. This means also that it is possible to keep the Ubuntu TeXLive packages installed, if you have some other packages which depend on them.