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Comment by gfxgirl | Hacker News Reader

45 to 90 mins to update my Macs. They might not reboot 5 to 10 times but it's not quick.

19.04 Ubuntu just died on me today (I know some expert could have gotten in working). Apparently 19.04 support ended and someone took down the servers. So trying to update would tell me something about the servers having no release file. And they wouldn't let me update to 20.04 until I patched 19.04. I never modded anything. Whatever broke it broke itself. I searched the net for answers but my search foo sucked. Someone said download the 19.04 ISO and extract the sources.list file out. I did, it had different repos but got the same errors (with the source urls pointing to the new places of course)

So, 8 hours later I just finished reformatted the drive and installed 20.04

Yep, Linux is painless :rolleyes:

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> I searched the net for answers but my search foo sucked.

Do not feel bad about it at all: somehow it seems impossible to search for answers related to Ubuntu. Anything related is for something like 14.* or 12.* releases. I do not understand what is going on: are people really not asking the questions for newer versions, both Google and DDG not properly ranking or are the questions/answers getting somehow marked as dupe and deleted?

19.04 isn't an LTS (long term support) release, it has 9 months of support, you're supposed to upgrade to the next release in a timely manner.

If you're not going to do release upgrades frequently you should stick to LTS releases (20.04 is one), which are supported for over 4 years: https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

Cononical should really keep the old repos up for longer. At least the parts necessary for upgrading to the next version. 19.04 is barely over a year old. It's entirely reasonable for users to leave a computer for a few months and expect it to still work when they come back.

Sure they could use LTS but that has the same problem, just on a longer timescale.

I could turn on a PC with the first Windows 10 beta and it would update to the latest Windows 10 no problem. There's no reason Ubuntu can't do the same.

I don't know why major distribution upgrades are so unreliable. I used to be a Fedora user and it was pretty much impossible to upgrade the distribution version without breaking a lot of stuff. The package manager corrupted its own database once. I switched to Arch Linux and never had these problems ever again despite all the memes about Arch being unstable.

Distro upgrades have been pretty much solved problem in Fedora since about Fedora 20. With Fedora 32 just released, that means ~6 years ago.

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