[Bug 1745754] [NEW] Dist Upgrade Path Bug

[Launchpad Bug Tracker]

You have been subscribed to a public bug:

There is no good path for non technical users to upgrade end of life
versions of Ubuntu.

Explanation and suggestion below.

I am a 25 year user of linux and at least a decade on ubuntu. I also am
an it professional so have little problem diving below the interface to
fix stuff or do non standard configuration. However I prefer stuff to
just work and not have to go below the hood so to say. More importantly
is all those people that simply don't have the ability to go below the
hood.  I was running Zesty which was released just over a year ago and
suddenly was unable to update or do a dist upgrade. I understand it was
not a LTS release and am ok with updates not happening, but I was
running it because 17.10 broke some of my software I use. However there
is no upgrade path on a zesty computer at this time without manually
changing your apt sources files. To me this is unacceptable.

My suggestion is to even if you disable updates or even installation of
other software from the repositories for the outdated distro that you
leave the ability to do a dist upgrade. It could  be as simple as a
option to dist upgrade that runs a scrip like I just ran to change to
the archived version of the zesty repository and then rant the dist
upgrade. I can also think of several other ways.

what I did was use 
sudo sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list 
and then 
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

For a technical user this is a relatively easy fix to the problem. For a
non technical user that is a multi year educational journey to learn how
to do this, they don't want this knowledge they just want their computer
to work. I know that it should be a fairly easy fix for the people that
maintain the gui upgrade.

My wife or mom or many other people I have using Ubuntu desktops
wouldn't know how to do this. It is a major failure point as a desktop
to have a version just over a year old that someone can't click a button
to update to the next version. I would propose that it shouldn't matter
how old it is that there should always be left a standard upgrade path
to the next version even if you are no longer supporting it. This type
of major disconnect in usability is what pushes normal computer users to
just go back to windows or mac. Even I was really irritated that I had
to figure out why updating and installing software quit working and then
figure out how to fix it.

My overall suggestion would be not to archive older distro's just put in
a pop up when you update or install software that your distro is no
longer supported and click here to update. It would seem to be a fairly
simple solution.

** Affects: ubuntu-release-upgrader (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: dist ubuntu upgrade
-- 
Dist Upgrade Path Bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1745754
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to ubuntu-release-upgrader in Ubuntu.