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I just upgraded my 22.04 LTS desktop to 24.04.1 LTS. The upgrade seemed to go fine. On the final reboot the desktop came up in console mode. The GUI never started. I saw no interesting errors in the syslog. To try to fix this I did a

sudo apt install gnome-shell

This caused the GUI to start on reboot but I totally hate this interface! The Wayland choice is no longer there. Just Ubuntu and Ubunti Xorg.

I don't know if this matters but the video is a RV730XT Radeon HD4670 PCI card

On further cursory inspection it appears that a LOT of apps are no longer there. Software & Updater and the legacy terminal shell to name just two. The printer queues all disappeared. Brasero won't run complaining about missing libraries. There is a LOT of software that was removed and not replaced!

I probably should have waited to do this upgrade but the release is now 24.04.1 indicating that it is a tested, shaken down, stable release. I received the popup asking if I wanted to upgrade to the latest LTS and I clicked upgrade.

This upgrade issued no errors yet has turned out to be a massive fail. The desktop is running but is completely unusable. I could really use some help here!

As observed in the comments, it seems that the update was massively incomplete. Uh, yeah...

So how do I fix this without having to do a clean install? I did try to repeat the upgrade but it responded that everything is up-to-date. What's needed, I think, is a method of re-installing this upgrade where all of the missing software will be installed. Is this possible?

Thanks in advance!

Archisman Panigrahi
  • 38,814
jones0610
  • 2,514

1 Answers1

22

In case you are unable to open a terminal, open a virtual terminal with ctrl + alt + f3, and then login with your username and password.

First, ensure that all the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu.sources contain the word noble instead of jammy. If it contains jammy, replace that with noble.

sudo sed -i 's/jammy/noble/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo sed -i 's/jammy/noble/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu.sources

You can install all preinstalled Ubuntu packages with the commands

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop^

Note that the ^ is necessary.

If you are using Xubuntu (say), then the last command should be

sudo apt install --reinstall xubuntu-desktop^

and so on. For other flavors of Ubuntu, you can use the following table. Ensure that you add ^ after the package name.

Flavour Package
Default (Gnome (17.10 - present)) ubuntu-desktop
Budgie (simple/elegant) budgie-desktop
Kubuntu (KDE Plasma) kubuntu-desktop
Kylin (elegant Chinese) ubuntukylin-desktop
Lubuntu (LXQt - light/fast) lubuntu-desktop
MATE (GNOME 2 fork) ubuntu-mate-desktop
Studio (Multimedia) ubuntustudio-desktop
Unity ubuntu-unity-desktop
Xubuntu (XFce - light/configurable) xubuntu-desktop
Cinnamon ubuntucinnamon-desktop
Edubuntu edubuntu-desktop

Source.

Archisman Panigrahi
  • 38,814