Huge number of problems on upgrade of Neon to 24.04

Help
1

Upgrade ended with an “Upgrade failed” window with the heading “Upgrade failed with the following output:” I saved the text, which includes 5038 lines. There are many occurrences of “Error” and “Broken”.

I can post this somewhere (where?) but for now my question for now is how to recover.

I did a Timeshift prior to the final Discover update and 24.04 upgrade.

I have NOT restarted - seems too risky.

Has the failed upgrade left something that will happen on reboot or is it safe to run the Timeshift restore in my current session?

BTW, I was surprised when the upgrade went south, and in such a big way. I haven’t seen many problem reports and haven’t done anything special with my Neon install.

Here’s my current system info:

Operating System: KDE neon 6.2
KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.1
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.7.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.8.0-45-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS w/ Radeon 780M Graphics
Memory: 30.7 GB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Graphics
Manufacturer: Framework
Product Name: Laptop 16 (AMD Ryzen 7040 Series)
System Version: A7

2

No, restoring the snapshot is fine, assuming this is a BTRFS snapshot and not an rsync one, I did so a few times when testing upgrades with a setup I knew would fail. PPAs that provide things newer that what is in 24.04, for example. These third-party repos are always problematic on Ubuntu based distro upgrades.

BTRFS snapshots are perfect for this sort of situation.
I have no real idea if rsync ones are good for this purpose or not as I don’t know how deep they go or if they can recover an upgraded OS or an attempted one. My educated guess and my gut tell me maybe not.

My own experiences over many years have been mainly ones of success. But every system is different and I have never had a 100% success rate on any distro’s upgrade process. I always assume something will go wrong.

3

Thanks, claydoh. Unfortunately my question still stands as I’m using an ext4 filesystem so it’s a rsync timeshift.

I wasn’t expecting perfection either, just thought maybe a couple of minor issues …

4

I just kept things simple. I made a complete backup of my drive that the OS is on by using Rescuezilla, the GUI fork of Clonezilla.

There’s a reason why I keep my OS drive small too; and keep my data on separate drives (also backed up). Along with keeping my home folder on a separate partition. Makes it take much less time when it comes to backing up and restoring.

I recommend people do this sort of thing before actually upgrading their daily driver.

Anyway, I restored the image to a virtual machine to test how well the upgrade would go. I had issues with the upgrade GUI tool and it crashed at the end when configuring packages. Had to use dpkg --reconfigure -a to configure them. Then had to use apt autoremove to clean up all the unnecessary packages.

For right now, I am just going to stay on 22.04 until things get smoothed out.

1 Like
5

With Linux Mint, my strategy was to have my hourly Snapshots but also a full rsync backup off the system drive.

I always found that a completely fresh install was better for the big upgrades than simply running the upgrade, I would allow myself a half day to get it set up and tweaked again.

This caters for disasters (hardware failures etc) allowing for a speedy fresh install and recovery of all your settings/data/personal files.

6

OK, the OP here. For closure, here’s what I did.

I, of course, did not reboot after the failed upgrade and continued to run on my current 22.04 session while I decided what to do next (and while waiting for replies here). But then neon crashed - first time ever! - probably due to the new files already there from the failed upgrade.

Fortunately, I had a second distro, KaOS, installed on my system. It also runs up-to-date plasma, and is a rolling distro, and I was watching it because I thought its philosophy was interesting - its focus is on one DE (KDE Plasma), one toolkit (Qt), and one architecture (x86_64).

So I took some time figuring out what were my plasma config files on Neon, and copied them to the KaOS install, and all looks the same now.

I probably still could have tried the timeshift restore for Neon, but even if it worked, I’d still need to upgrade to 24.04 at some point and without knowing why my first upgrade attempt failed, I’d have no expectation that I could get a second try to work.

My hope was low of finding fixes that would allow a successful upgrade on second try because:

  • which specific error or errors actually caused the upgrade to fail are not specified in the log output
  • I see no real interest by anyone in pursuing the upgrade failures, not here, nor in the bug list. (The bug list I see already has several reports of some of the same errors I’ve been getting, but there has be no response to these there.)

So KaOS will do for now. However it is not as popular as other distros rocking Plasma so if that becomes a problem, I might switch to the Plasma versions of Tumbleweed or EndeavourOS. Or if Neon was replaced by a rolling “KDE Linux” as I’ve recently read here, that would be great.

I’ve become a fan of rolling distros, because I had a Mint install I was also watching, and I had problems with it too when it upgraded from 22.04 to 24.04.

7

I completely agree with your method. I do suggest however, that those of us who plan for these kinds of upgades often never experience the same kinds of problems other people do. For me, it was nearly flawless, and its has fixed so many long standing issues that crept into Neon over the past year as the old base aged out. I highly recommend upgrading.

If you run into the boot loop problem, use the Neon live USB and simply run “efibootmgr” and delete the stale entry. The valid ones should be labeled “KDE Neon” and whatever your USB drive is called, often just “UEFI OS” depending on how it was created.

If you run Neon solo, and have one labeled “Ubuntu” or simply “KDE”, they are stale and need to be deleted when you have tested things to make sure you got the right one. Then after you are back in Neon, check your FSTAB as it removed SWAP entry on mine.

sudo efibootmgr -B -b Bootxxxx

(where xxxx is the boot number listed for the stale entry, EG: Boot0006).

After that is been smooth sailing. I should point out I still use X11 as Wayland is still far too limited at this time. When it becomes stable and has at least feature parity with X, I will move to Wayland. For the time being, I only keep it on my experimental Kubuntu install. I have found NV550 to be most stable on my rig if you use an Nvidia GPU.

1 Like
8

The upgrade to my desktop PC was fine. However I had to do a clean install in my laptop because I guess I had too many 3rd party repos there (the last year I was using my laptop just for experimenting) or maybe because the original installation was rather old (I installed KDE Neon back in 2018 and I was upgrading since then).

Maybe you should consider a clean install. Not the best option, but it is what it is.

9

I really don’t have to worry. I may think about upgrading next month some time. Again, no rush. My system works fine as it is right now.

Also, I never used UEFI; as my old system that I upgraded from (the Q6600 I used for 13 years is what I originally installed Neon on never had UEFI).

As for Nvidia troubles, I am glad I ditched Nvidia about 4 years ago when it comes to all of my computers. Now the entire household only really uses AMD (and some Intel). Because of that, I have no issues using Wayland.

But I’ll keep an eye on what happens to the swap. See? Something new I figured out by waiting. Though, I don’t see myself ever using the swap because I never went over even 15 GB of the 32 GB of RAM I do have. And I don’t see the rest of the household going over 4 GB of the 8 GB of RAM they have in their systems.

10

Q6600? Wow that takes me back. Great CPU in its day. I really liked mine. It wasn’t faster than my FX55 system at the time, but it was less expensive by far. One of the few Intel CPUs that were actually a good value. I have never had trouble with Nvidia. If you do any sort of media work (3D animations, film compositing, etc) then CUDA is a necessity as it is the defacto GPGPU standard (some high end apps I use do not even support AMD GPUs), and the more memory you can throw at it the better. Love my AMD CPUs though. AMD CPUs with NVidia GPUs have been rock solid for me since the early 2000s.

1 Like
11

Good thing I don’t care about any media work. I just want better (and hassle free) drivers which is AMD excels at better than Nvidia after my experiences. You just plug it in and forget it.

If I were to do any media work, I would do all that on a separate machine that has Nvidia; as I never want to deal with Nvidia problems ever again on my main rig.

Also, the reason why I upgraded after 13 years to an an all AMD rig is because not only are the drivers better optimized for Linux (better than using AMD hardware Windows in fact), but I also wanted to to have better PCSX2 emulation (for games like Gran Turismo 4, which really pushed the original PS2 hardware to the limits). Along with being able to use GPU pass through with my old Nvidia GPU.

That’s really the only reason why I upgraded. I can promise you that I didn’t upgrade with being able to play the modern, woke, AAA trash games in mind. Perhaps the newest game I ever played (that wasn’t a remake) is Nier Automata. But other than that, it’s been all indie; like Stardew valley, or old AAA games from the PS1 and PS2 era.

So, what I have now, a rig with a Ryzen 5 5600G paired with my brother’s old RX 580 (along with an old 750 Ti for the Windows VM that I keep totally offline) is more than enough for what I do on my machine.

12

Getting back to the topic at hand, all I was saying was the new 24.04 rebase is great, that the update to Plasma 6.2.2 has resulted in (as far as I can tell) a flawless system again as 22.04 was showing its age, and that waiting is probably unnecessary if you are interested in upgrading now (with the usual caveat of “be prepared”). If you are not interested in it, then more power to you. I am by no means suggesting you should. You do you.

13

Cool. Glad you understand that I am waiting for a reason. I’ll consider upgrading next month; should the upgrade go smoothly with a copy of my current installation in a virtual machine as a test.