[Bug 1745754] Re: upgrading from an End of Life release is not easy peasy

[Scott Carle]

I don't believe it has anything to do with  non standard 3rd party apt
sources. I had disabled all of them other than the bone stock ubuntu
sources. Also I had no issue upgrading at all after i fixed the location
of the servers to the archives. This is simply a complaint that there is
no upgrade path other than manually changing repositories to the
archives on a now unsupported release. It is bad human ergonomics :)

I did note that there was a bug in the updater with bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1744722 I did not have any issues with
upgrading once the source list servers info was corrected.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1745754

Title:
  upgrading from an End of Life release is not easy peasy

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

Bug description:
  There is no good path for non technical users to upgrade end of life
  versions of Ubuntu.

  Explanation and suggestion below.

  I am a 25 year user of linux and at least a decade on ubuntu. I also
  am an it professional so have little problem diving below the
  interface to fix stuff or do non standard configuration. However I
  prefer stuff to just work and not have to go below the hood so to say.
  More importantly is all those people that simply don't have the
  ability to go below the hood.  I was running Zesty which was released
  just over a year ago and suddenly was unable to update or do a dist
  upgrade. I understand it was not a LTS release and am ok with updates
  not happening, but I was running it because 17.10 broke some of my
  software I use. However there is no upgrade path on a zesty computer
  at this time without manually changing your apt sources files. To me
  this is unacceptable.

  My suggestion is to even if you disable updates or even installation
  of other software from the repositories for the outdated distro that
  you leave the ability to do a dist upgrade. It could  be as simple as
  a option to dist upgrade that runs a scrip like I just ran to change
  to the archived version of the zesty repository and then rant the dist
  upgrade. I can also think of several other ways.

  what I did was use 
  sudo sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list 
  and then 
  sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

  For a technical user this is a relatively easy fix to the problem. For
  a non technical user that is a multi year educational journey to learn
  how to do this, they don't want this knowledge they just want their
  computer to work. I know that it should be a fairly easy fix for the
  people that maintain the gui upgrade.

  My wife or mom or many other people I have using Ubuntu desktops
  wouldn't know how to do this. It is a major failure point as a desktop
  to have a version just over a year old that someone can't click a
  button to update to the next version. I would propose that it
  shouldn't matter how old it is that there should always be left a
  standard upgrade path to the next version even if you are no longer
  supporting it. This type of major disconnect in usability is what
  pushes normal computer users to just go back to windows or mac. Even I
  was really irritated that I had to figure out why updating and
  installing software quit working and then figure out how to fix it.

  My overall suggestion would be not to archive older distro's just put
  in a pop up when you update or install software that your distro is no
  longer supported and click here to update. It would seem to be a
  fairly simple solution.

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