Error upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04

[Tom H]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 10:43 PM Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:
> 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.

?
apt-get install vanilla-gnome-desktop
?

and if you get an error about "pager", prepend this command with the
envvars of my previous email.