I’m using Neon (user) Plasma on multiple computers, and one of them wouldn’t offer an upgrade from Plasma 5.26 to 6.0+ at all. I have no idea what I need to do to get it to upgrade to Plasma 6.0+. I tried apt update, pkcon refresh and pkcon update on the commandline, and the Discover GUI, all say “everything is up to date”. Yet the OS is still running kernel 5.15 and Plasma 5.26. All the other computers upgraded long ago already.
It’s becoming a problem now because the installed latest kernel, 5.15.0-113, will not boot with my AMD integrated GPU, so I need to go through grub on each reboot and select an older kernel; I can do it, but the wife can’t.
Any recommendations on what I might be missing / doing wrong?
Something is wrong on your system.
If you are on Plasma 5.26, you haven’t seen any Plasma updates from neon since before February 2023.
Having the 5.15 kernel tells me that you might not have upgraded from the Ubuntu 20.04 base to the 22.04 back in October 2023. 5.15 is the current kernel in Ubuntu 20.04, while the current one in 22.04 is 6.5, with 5.15 as a backup.
I am not sure if it is possible at this point to upgrade to the 22.04 base, or if it is safe to do so if it is.
With the rebase to the 24.04 base somewhere around the corner, it might be a better and safer option to back up things and do a fresh install.
Thanks for the assessment. I will probably do a fresh install once the 24.04 rebase is available.
Still, any idea why the update didn’t go through? I don’t want to get into the same situation again in the future.
I have an hourly cron job that runs pkcon refresh ; pkcon update under root, I expected this to take care of updating the system as much as possible. The computer runs pretty much 24/7. If there is only a limited time window for the upgrade to a newer base, I’m surprised that this setup managed to miss it completely. Even the laptop I use only about twice a month did manage to get updated, after all.
The upgrade tool is the same as Ubuntu’s, a separate utility that places a notification on the system tray. it isn’t handled by Discover at all. I can’t say why you didn’t get it on that system. The lack of any new Plasma updates or new kernels would have been a clue that something was amiss.
For a cron job or scripting, imo using the OS’ native apt-get may be a better way to go for this purpose than tools like pkcon that are layered on top of it, or utilize Debian/Ubuntu’s unattended-upgrades tools.
In the end I attempted the upgrade anyway, after all I had nothing to lose at this point. I did a sudo do-release-upgrade (I had completely forgotten there’s this utility to upgrade) and ended up with a broken system, booting into a black screen with cursor only. Thanks to this thread I was able to painstakingly get it back into working state: