Problem installing 19.10

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 at 13:01, Ian Bruntlett <ian.bruntlett at gmail.com> wrote:
> Could the problem be that you are not formatting your / partition? What is on it already?

It's possible.

FWIW I installed 19.10 at the weekend too, and I too had problems. I
have a new testbed laptop (a cheap 2nd-hand ThinkPad T420: Core i5,
4GB RAM, ⅓TB hard disk.) It had a clean install of 19.04 from about 3
weeks ago, because I thought I'd give GNOME another try.

I customised it a little with Dash-To-Dock, OpenWeather, Extend Panel
Menu, Unite and that was about it.

19.10 stalled at removing a "Python simple JSON" package. The machine
was thrashing the disk _hard_ and because I didn't have a memory or
performance monitor open I couldn't see what was wrong. It was
thrashing so hard that even with 30min or more of trying, I couldn't
so much as get to a vconsole.

I left it overnight.

Same in the morning but now it was (I guess) so hopelessly
over-committed there was only the occasional blip of disk activity.
Couldn't even move the mouse pointer. So I power-cycled it.

It booted into 19.10 fine as if nothing was wrong. There were a ton of
packages to remove but it was good to go. However, my GNOME profile
seems unretrievable -- the addons don't work, can't be removed, can't
be updated...

I think I'll have to add an account from the shell, nuke my profile
and start over.

GNOME 3 really needs a "safe mode" login. :-/

Anyway, yes, perhaps the most problematic Ubuntu version upgrade I've
ever had, and it was a clean install this month, with almost nothing
installed and almost zero use. :-(

There were celebrations on Twitter yesterday because yesterday was the
15th anniversary of the Ubuntu release.

IMHO this thread nails it:
https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1186097266903285760

Especially:

Matthew Garrett @mjg59
Frankly I still think that Ubuntu in that era was the closest Linux
has ever got to being a viable desktop OS and I'm sad that investment
in desktop Linux has basically declined since then

Brian Swetland @dnaltews
Ubuntu hit a level of relatively painless "it just works" that I had
not experienced in previous Linux distros. It's still my default
desktop/laptop distro but I feel like they've lost their way a bit...

@jrm4
Armchair quarterbacking for sure -- but the fact that they decided to
take on Apple with Unity instead of taking advantage of XP's end of
life by just being the "OS that just works" still bugs many of us...

And in re that last one, bear in mind that I'm a Unity fan...

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