[Bug 1589551] Re: upgrading from 14.04 to 16.04 or direct install of 16.04 fails

[Kern Sibbald]

Last night my wife made the mistake of answering yes to the upgrade to
16.04 message that appeared on her 14.04 Gnome desktop.  Like the other
upgrades this one was a spectacular failure.  The net result is a black
screen of death.  I haven't seen this kind of total failure since the
early Windows days.

This is really pitiful. Almost 3 months after I first reported this
problem (and there are *many* other similar reports), and something like
four or five months after the product release, it still has a 100%
failure rate to install here (4 different machines).

The worst part of it, is though I am a relatively experienced Linux
developer and long time Ubuntu user, I have been unable to resurrect a
single one of these broken machines, because they end up in such a
messed up final state of missing, conflicting, or misconfigured
packages.

I have no choice but to follow advice that previously given only by
Microsoft and re-install the system from scratch.  Two of the updates
involved long running machines, so they probably had some old packages,
but they were all 100% patched to the latest 14.04.  Two of the machines
were very recent new installations of 14.04 (less than a month old).

Sorry for some of the insulting/sarcastic language, but for a long time
you had a great product, but for this release you have really screwed up
-- probably because you have diversified into too many new "products"
and not allocated appropriate resources to your base system.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to ubuntu-release-upgrader in
Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1589551

Title:
  upgrading from 14.04 to 16.04 or direct install of 16.04 fails

Status in ubuntu-release-upgrader package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  This is probably the same as many of the other bug reports already
  reported on updating from 14.04 or directly installing 16.04, so after
  reading this bug report, feel free to close it.

  I have been using Ubuntu LTS for about 10 years now and never had any
  serious problems. 16.04 is a total disaster for me.

  - Starting from a 14.04 desktop system fully patched and doing a dist-
  upgrade fails leaving many uninstalled packages and package conflicts
  that I have not been able to fix manually (50-100 packages).  I think
  I know all the tricks for installing almost anything, but no go here.

  - New Lenovo Yoga 900.  Install 14.04 zero problems. Fully update it.
  dist-upgrade. Same results as above.  Note the 14.04 had only Ubuntu
  packages and was only about a week old before the dist-upgrade.

  - Retry the dist-upgrade on the above.  No go, same problem.

  - Do a new upgrade from a USB stick of 16.04 on the above system
  containing 14.04 partially upgraded to 16.04 but not working.  It
  produced a working 16.04, but destroyed my Windows dual boot, and
  wiped out the Windows recovery partition.  This is extremely annoying
  because I had not made recovery disks. Once I get new install media
  and re-install Windows 10 (beautiful with a nice touch screen even if
  it is Windows) I am thinking about sticking to Windows (after 16 years
  of using Linux on my laptops this is really bad).

  - Do a fresh install of 16.04 on a tower computer.  All goes quite
  well.  However after doing an apt-get upgrade to get fully patched,
  then part way through loading about 100 packages for a developer's
  setup, I double click on the Amazon icon, which comes up slowly then
  totally freezes the system.  This is much like the black screen
  syndrome that Windows used to have -- requires a power off (hold the
  power button down 10 seconds)!

  - Reboot after power off in prior case, and things seem to work until
  I double click on the Amazon button and then close the window.  The
  app crashes with a webapp-container problem.

  Conclusion:
  This is not the way to keep happy users.  16.04 is for me unusable.  For the first time in a very long time, I am very disappointed.  IMO, 16.04 should be considered unstable beta software.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
  Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:0.220.8
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-87.133-generic 3.13.11-ckt39
  Uname: Linux 3.13.0-87-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
  ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.21
  Architecture: amd64
  CrashDB: ubuntu
  CurrentDesktop: XFCE
  Date: Mon Jun  6 16:53:55 2016
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-12-23 (531 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140722.2)
  PackageArchitecture: all
  SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
  Symptom: dist-upgrade
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2016-05-16 (21 days ago)
  VarLogDistupgradeAptlog:
   Log time: 2016-05-16 09:48:08.557294
   Log time: 2016-05-16 09:48:12.502444

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+bug/1589551/+subscriptions