Error upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2020-06-18 at 21:27 +0100, Colin Law wrote:
> What does
> sudo apt install -f
> show?

Well, I'm not sure what it said back when it was broken; now it says:

  0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

I had done various dist-upgrade, etc. operations and it never
complained about any packages that were not configured etc.  I just got
"up to date".


I spun up a KVM and installed Ubuntu 20.04 ISO in a virtual machine to
get the package list from it.  Based on that I discovered I was missing
some important packages that were depended on by ubuntu-desktop: things
like gnome-logs, gnome-system-monitor, gnome-calculator, and a batch of
icons, ffmpeg codecs, some XDG stuff, etc.  I installed them and I
think thinks are better.

I have a thought about what might have been part of the problem: I
really hate the dock and there's no good way to get rid of it, except
by removing gnome-shell-extension-ubuntu-dock (trying to turn it off
with tweak doesn't do anything).

However, when you do that it removes ubuntu-desktop meta-package,
because it's a required package.  I did that like 2 years ago so of
course I forgot about it.

Now when I upgraded, since I didn't have the ubuntu-desktop package
installed, maybe it didn't upgrade everything that was needed...

A real pain.  I wish there was a better way to have exactly this
desktop with everything the same except not run the dock, without this
little landmine lying around waiting for you when you want to upgrade.